Spelman alum nabs starring role in ‘The Devil to Pay’

Last month when Cord Jefferson gave his Emmy acceptance speech for co-writing episode six, “The Extraordinary Being,” from HBO’s hit limited series “Watchmen,” he made headlines thanking his therapist. Yet, a lot of folks in Atlanta heard something that hit much closer to home — him thanking actress Danielle Deadwyler, who played wife, June, to Jovan Adepo’s Will Reeves.

The Atlanta native, who graduated from both Grady High School and Spelman College, only learned about it through a flood of texts. Her response at the time: “I can’t even watch it because my Wi-Fi is messed up.” No huge loss. Deadwyler is starting to make her own mark in Hollywood. This month “The Devil To Pay,” her first feature film starring just her, can be viewed at home via VOD or in-person at Atlanta’s iconic Plaza Theatre. Pretty soon, her Southern set Spectrum Originals series “Paradise Lost,” with Josh Hartnett and fellow Atlanta actress Gail Bean, will be widely available. And, if that weren’t enough, she’s currently in Sante Fe, New Mexico filming the western, “The Harder They Fall,” with Idris Elba, “Watchmen” star Regina King, Jonathan Majors of “Lovecraft Country,” LaKeith Stanfield of FX’s “Atlanta” and more for Netflix ― and getting billing for it. More impressively, she’s mostly done it all from her hometown.

Credit: Mark Hill

Credit: Mark Hill

Her mother unknowingly set it all in motion when Deadwyler was just three. After catching her dancing to “Soul Train," mama enrolled her in dance classes. That evolved not just into theater but into a lifelong journey as an artist that she also shares with her older sister, Gabrielle Fulton Ponder, the local filmmaker and writer known for her play, “Uprising,” and the Will Packer-produced TV show “Ambitions” that starred Robin Givens.

As Atlanta has evolved, so has Deadwyler. “This is a place that informs the unique quality of what I do,” she says. “Atlanta defines me, and Atlanta defines the choices that I make and how I carry out my work.” It’s Atlanta where she got her first leading role as a struggling young mother in the film “A Cross To Bear,” opposite the legendary Kim Fields, for Atlanta-based UPtv (then GMC TV) back in 2012. It is because of Atlanta that she’s been recognized as Quita from “Tyler Perry’s the Haves and the Have Nots” from as close as Macon to New York City. It’s also Atlanta where she booked and filmed “Watchmen,” “Atlanta,” “P-Valley” and more. And it’s Atlanta, specifically the Buckhead Film Group and Atlanta-based husband-and-wife screenwriters/filmmakers Ruckus and Lane Skye, known for indie darlings “Becky” and “Rattle the Cage,” that is behind her first headlining feature film.

Credit: Handout

In “The Devil To Pay,” which played at the Atlanta Film Festival and BronzeLens Film Festival last year, Deadwyler, also the film’s associate producer, plays Lemon, a young mother of one whose husband’s disappearance has left an unpaid debt that the powerful family on the mountain is forcing her to settle. Although race is unspoken, it’s a very real factor in the isolation, desperation and resolve in Deadwyler’s portrayal of Lemon.

Credit: BreeAnne Clowdus

“There’s an intelligence to how she’s negotiating things. She’s pushed to the brink,” Deadwyler explains. “There’s an emergence of rage that happens in her experience, which I correlate to the experience of a lot of black folks, Black women specifically enraged at the experience that they are having and you’re pushing us to the edge. And what happens? You’re going to bust out, you’re going to break out and that’s what happens to Lemon.”

Another surprising thing for Deadwyler in this film is that her son, Ezra Haslam, also plays Lemon’s son Coy. That, she says, almost didn’t happen.

“We did audition some other kids, but they wanted that intimacy between the mother and son to happen,” she recounts. The only thing is when she asked her son, he wasn’t as enthusiastic.

“Ezra had just done an audition with a short film. He got a callback, and he said he didn’t feel like he had done his best, so he was going to take a break,” she continues. “I asked him, and he said no.” When asked again a few weeks later, however, he agreed.

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It’s a gift she’s happy to share with her son, even when it gets hard. “Juggling, doing the work and being a mother, that’s the most challenging, and yet, I feel like it’s the most rich” she says. “I know I get to show my son that I am doing the things that are important to me.”

And giving back all Atlanta has given to her is one of them.