Teyonah Parris, leaping stereotypes in a single bound
Not all heroes wear capes. Some show up in an orange faux fur jacket with thigh-high yellow suede boots and matching chaps. But if the world gets saved, who cares, right? Turns out it’s a little more complicated than that. Who gets to do the saving says a lot about who society dubs worthy. But the dividing line is slowly disappearing, because this year Hollywood found itself a woman who can play both sides: Teyonah Parris.
“I wanted to be a superhero. I wanted to be telling the stories of marginalized women who are superheroes. These are the women who are actually in our communities. There should be space to see their humanity even though it might not look nice and clean and pretty, but they get the job done, as Black women do,” said Parris.
In “They Cloned Tyrone,” in theaters and on Netflix now, Parris plays Yo-Yo, a sex worker who battles the baddies alongside her pimp and the neighborhood dope boy. Then in November, the actress will join the superpowered Three Musketeers as Monica Rambeau in “The Marvels.”
“They Cloned Tyrone” is a genre-jumping tale about a mysterious government entity conducting clandestine experiments on an invisible section of society — people in the hood. It falls to three so-called criminals to set things right. In a movie centered on the marginalized, Yo-Yo is the lowest on the totem pole. While Captain Monica Rambeau in “The Marvels,” the MCU’s sequel to “Captain Marvel,” doesn’t necessarily fit the superhero type — she tops off her dazzlingly white super suit with big natural hair — she’s still got a pedigree and a title that confer respect. So it’s Yo-Yo, battling in leopard-print leggings, who feels the most defiant.
The road from one character to the other is one that, for Parris, seems preordained.
“I don’t think that I could practically see (playing a super hero), but it was in my heart. What I have learned
is that the things I have put into the universe, God has made a way for those things to materialize for me,” said Parris. “I just want to make sure that I’m a good steward of it.”
That was especially true of the Yo-Yo role. Parris was sensitive about how the character came off. According to the actress, writers Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier did a great job of taking the archetypes of the film’s main characters — prostitute, pimp, drug dealer — and leading them on a “Wizard of Oz”-like journey during which they devolve into stereotypes only to come out on the other side fully fleshed out.
Which is why, when an early draft of the film’s ending painted Yo-Yo as a damsel in distress as opposed to a woman in control of her destiny, Parris raised her hand.
“I hit up Tony and Juel, like, ‘This doesn’t feel like the Yo-Yo you all created,’” Parris said. “All of a sudden she’s lost all agency. I’m not buying it. Can we think of something else?” After two conversations and as many rewrites, the duo came back with the version in the film.
No spoilers: Yo-Yo is anything but helpless. The reworked ending was a triumph for Parris, too. Watching the moment for the first time in front of a rapt live audience at the American Black Film Festival in Miami last month, the actress felt vindicated. Folks screamed during that one scene.
“I was like ‘Yasssss,’” said Parris. “She saved her dang self, you know. And there’s also this thing of Black women saving the day and pushing the efforts forward. Yo-Yo is the one mobilizing. I loved that about her. And once we got to the end, I didn’t want to see her lose all that agency. But at the same time, she does need help. We cannot do it alone. And I thought the way we ended up filming it spoke to that.”
“Yo-Yo is very ambitious, she’s intelligent and she’s got a big, big heart,” Parris added. “She’s going to fight for those she loves and she’s going to stand up for those who don’t have a voice, even though people don’t stand up for her. And she’s a dreamer.”
In essence the character is unapologetically herself — a trait Parris has adopted in the years since the South Carolina native arrived in Los Angeles after graduating from Julliard in 2010. Her first major role was as Dawn Chambers on the hit AMC series “Mad Men” which she followed up with standout turns in “Dear White People,” “Chi-Raq” and “Survivor’s Remorse.”
When she was a child, Parris’s mother motivated her by invoking Angela Bassett like an affirmation. If Parris wanted to be like Angela Bassett someday, she had better learn the lines of her school play and show up ready. Back then, the actress didn’t realize what her mother was really doing — showing her images of a future that matched her reflection.
“And now to be a dark-skinned Black woman with big, natural hair in a Marvel superhero movie? This is literally what I needed to see growing up. This is what my daughter will see growing up,” Parris said.