Tyler Perry finds ‘Grace’ outside Hollywood
Tyler Perry keeps a straight face. When I ask if it’s OK to record our conversation, he replies, “No. No. I need you to write down every word.” He holds a formidable stare for more than a few seconds. Then the writer, director and actor breaks character, and a triangular smile cracks across his face. “I’m kidding,” he says. “Do what you got to do.”
It’s a reminder that Perry, 50, got his start doing theater.
Moments later I ask him about some of the imagery in his new film, “A Fall From Grace,” a thriller that began streaming on Netflix this weekend about a woman on trial for killing her husband in a small town in Virginia. Perry’s story positions numerous characters in seemingly normal but ultimately unnerving relationships with others: parent and child, friend and friend, client and attorney, entry-level employee and supervisor. The film has numerous shots of conjoined houses or twin-light lamps. And each character has a sort of public and private face.
He stares silently again. But this time he has more to say.
“I love how somebody can pick up on those things,” Perry says. “But that wasn’t my intention. Maybe that was the intention of my art director. This film has a lot of characters living dual lives. I was just trying to tell a story.”
Even if Perry didn’t demand the imagery that rests in the background of “A Fall From Grace,” he’s created an environment where others can leave their thumbprints. The film is the first shot at Tyler Perry Studios, a 300-acre production complex the director built near Atlanta that allows Perry to tell his stories with talent he deems best suited for it. TPS gives him the freedom to continue to approach Hollywood — a place that often didn’t take him seriously — on his own terms.
Much like the plays he wrote — regional theater productions that were ignored by many established theater companies — Perry’s film and TV pursuits are grass-roots productions. Having done a farewell tour for Madea — the character he developed for stage and successfully moved to film — Perry is more specifically focused on doing film and television his way.
“I wasn’t brought up in the Hollywood system,” he says. “So I don’t know how things go in that system. It lends me a lot of room to where I don’t mind breaking the mold and doing things differently.”
Netflix deal
“A Fall From Grace” is Perry’s first film in a deal with Netflix. And with it he relied on the approach that has turned him into a half-billion-dollar entertainment machine. He shot the film swiftly, using trusted crew he’d worked with before.
“My guys, my crew, they’re amazing,” he says. “We can do this in our sleep.”
He says with his television shows, he can do 70 to 100 pages of script per day. “We all have a shorthand that works well.”
He also has an eye for onscreen talent that has been, and remains, too often overlooked by Hollywood. Perry sits at the St. Regis in Houston flanked by three actresses of three generations, who all brought “A Fall From Grace” to life.
At 35, the youngest is Bresha Webb, whose 13 years on screen have largely been dedicated to comedy. She speaks with both reverence and exhaustion about the shoot.
“As an actress, it’s a dream to do something with a multilayered character that has a full journey,” she says.
Her Jasmine is a public defender whose boss (played by Perry) assigns her only those cases in which the defendant has already expressed a desire to strike a plea bargain.
“Especially coming from comedy, people see you one way,” she says. “So I like showing another slice of what I can do as an artist. That’s the dream.”
The film pivots around Crystal Fox, who at 56 is a veteran of stage and screen. She plays Grace, who is left by her husband, falls in love again and finds the rebound to be fraught.
Fox’s work in the film covers a lot of emotional territory, and she brilliantly covers its extremes.
“When people are betrayed, you assume they’ll shut down,” she says. “And a lot of time they do. So this begins with Grace betrayed by her first husband. But she wanted to go on. She tried to stay open. That’s why we’re rooting for her. She’s wounded, but she trusts her instincts. If somebody comes around and makes you feel beautiful and appreciated, that’s what you’re longing for. It takes the focus off of red flags.”
Phylicia Rashad comes back home
The third actress present is Phylicia Rashad, who plays Grace’s friend: a generation older but a confidante and figure of wise support.
Though Webb and Fox’s characters run a dramatic arc through the film’s narrative, Rashad’s is understated throughout. All three find nuance in their characters’ development, but Rashad’s Sarah often makes statements through subtle facial expressions.
She disappears into the role, which is no small task for one of the most identifiable faces from TV past. Netflix made clear Rashad would not be talking about the incarceration of her former co-star, Bill Cosby. But considering that show, it’s easy to see how our culture comes up with a shorthand for actors, affixing them to a point in time. Rashad has worked frequently and wonderfully since then, including recently in both “Creed” films and an acclaimed TV production of “A Raisin in the Sun.”
Her ability to both give and hold back information in “A Fall From Grace” is impressive — another reminder that one of the best-known actors to come from Houston has an admirable body of work to her name at age 71.
Asked about her hometown, Rashad takes a deep breath. She admits she doesn’t get back often.
“The things that have made it home are not here,” she says.
Her family — which includes actor and dancer Debbie Allen and musician Tex Allen — moved from Houston long ago.
“But it’s interesting,” she continues. “I guess I was having something like déjà vu being here. It took me all the way back to early childhood up through high school graduation. Remembering very specific smells, sounds, tastes, people I love, loved ones. And that’s interesting. That was very interesting to me, the way the mind does that. Just how all that happened, these feelings, from capturing some sunlight behind me.”
Rashad takes a similarly poetic approach to discussing the film. She notes that though all the principle characters arc far from where they begin, the approach as actors is to forget the next moment.
“As actors, we have this thing, playing the end at the beginning,” she says. “You don’t want to do that. You want to be in every single moment. You want it to be as it is in life. I don’t know what’s going to happen 10 minutes from now. Here we are in this room, very comfortable. But I don’t know what will happen in 10 minutes. You film the same way. The character should never know what’s going to happen 10 minutes from now.”
Which works with Perry’s approach. He started developing ideas for the film in late 2018 and shot it in five days late last year.
The cast speaks with both reverence and exasperation about the shooting schedule.
“I’m not going to lie,” Webb says. “There were days where I’m like, ‘Five pages in one day?!’ ”
But she also describes shooting on Perry’s studio as “spiritual.”
“We start every day with a prayer. Let the spirit lead us.”
Adds Fox, “Tyler creates an environment where we can feel the truth of a moment. That’s what I enjoy. … For a woman who has just messed up her life, there’s a lot of things in that. And he allows space for all of it. He saw a journey in my face. If that interrupts something and something comes out of it that’s different, he allows it.”
Perry likens it to another art form, and Webb agrees.
“It’s absolutely a dance,” Webb says. “In the sense that there’s a spirit flowing, it’s a dance.”
“It lends me a lot of room to where I don’t mind breaking the mold and doing things differently.” Tyler Perry, on operating outside the Hollywood system