ADRIENNE WARREN

The Tony Award winner for the title role in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, 34, plays another real-life role: Mamie Till-Mobley in Women of the Movement, which continues its limited-series run this week (Jan. 20 on ABC; streaming on Hulu). Till-Mobley ignited the civil rights movement as we know it today when, in 1955, she risked her life to find justice after her son Emmett Till was brutally murdered in the Jim Crow South.

Why tell the story of Emmett Till now? This is about informing those who may not have known before, so that we don’t continue to perpetuate these cycles hurting young people, which is hurting mothers, which is hurting humanity. We are hurting each other, and we are not seeing each other for who we really are.

Is there more responsibility playing real-life women as opposed to fictional ones? There’s so much responsibility in telling stories of people that are here and especially our ancestors, those that have passed on. Their history is our history. It is an honor to have the opportunity to tell their stories in the best way that I possibly can, and for me, that is erasing myself from the narrative and putting them forward.

Did you do a lot of research for the role? It is literally learning as much as you possibly can about the human being, who they are and presenting that in a way that is as truthful as possible.

What was it like filming in Mississippi? Feeling the dirt that they felt under our feet, being in some of the buildings that they were in, feeling the tension in the environment, in the air that is still there . . . not much has changed since 1955. You can feel the gravity of that, which takes everything that we are doing and elevates it in a way that makes this so unbelievably important because it's about education.