DA’VINE JOY RANDOLPH
started filming what impressed him most was how Randolph played those silences, especially in the dramatic moments. “There’s a moment where she’s unpacking her son’s baby stuff at her sister’s house and she brought a subtlety and profundity to it,” Payne says. “And when she’s in a drunk reverie at a party, the camera dollies in and she expresses a myriad of emotions I can’t fully name but which moved me.”
Randolph liked that she was playing a mother mourning her son’s death in a Christmas movie and that she was named Mary, and her son had been a sacrificial “Lamb” in Vietnam. “The more details, the better and a name holds a lot of meaning, in what people project onto you, what you embody and what you feel expectations are,” she says, pointing to her unique first name and her middle name as well. “You carry that with you everywhere you go.”
Her character must also swing from drama to comedy and back again — Payne says he tends to prefer actors with comedic chops for those shifts and Randolph agrees. Comedic actors “don’t get too precious with things and can throw things away because the biggest trap for this film would have been if it became melodramatic and really milked that,” she says. “Adding that flare of comedy after a really intense moment is quite a punch combo.”
Randolph found an easy chemistry with the film’s star, Paul Giamatti, who plays a cynical curmudgeon who uses verbal zingers like a shield. Both studied at the Yale School of Drama, which she thinks helped.
“I didn’t think that was going to mean anything but from the first take or two we were creating from a similar place and I knew our foundation was developed by our shared institution and the curriculum,” she says.
Randolph, who doesn’t like watching her performances, just “surrenders” to her characters.
“You turn your vessel over to her,” she says, adding that when she watched herself in “The Holdovers” it didn’t even feel like her. “I thought, ‘Who is that,’” she says with a laugh. “It’s like there’s the text, but when it’s on its feet, it just takes on a life on its own.”