In Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys, Alfre Woodard plays a powerful matriarch in a small town while her grown daughters deal with a variety of personal issues. Woodard's character Alice also serves as the ying to her rich white buddy Charlotte's (Kathy Bates) yang. The two women embark on a road trip, enjoying life in ways that the generation that comes after them fail to comprehend. Woodard spoke to Premiere about the ramifications of being in a Tyler Perry movie, some of the larger issues surrounding her career choices, and going on the road with Obama.
Was this a personal project for you?
It was an interesting gathering of people. I wanted to work with
Kathy Bates since I knew she was around. Tyler [Perry] invited us
to work together, so that was the big draw for me. Of course, I
liked Taraji [P. Henson] when I first saw her. So I wanted to come
together with this group of people. Also, Tyler has made a very
successful world there in Atlanta that he's able now to share
nationally, on film. It's a great place to work. It sort of reminds
me of how I thought cinema would work when I ran off to join the
whole circus when I left home. It's a place where, from the staff
to the crew, all those people were very exciting. They were so
appreciative of us being there. It was a lovely space to be in.
Tyler is as successful as he is because he identified an audience
that was not served. When he entertained that audience, they became
very loyal. There are a lot of other people that bleed over into
it, and I have a very disparate audience, but a very loyal part of
my audience coincides with his audience. I thought it was a good
idea to do a project that they would appreciate.
The movie offers a constant contrast between your
character and Kathy's character, two middle-aged American women
coming from different ethnic and social backgrounds who still
manage to cultivate an intimate friendship.
We knew the circumstances that Tyler wanted them in each time, but
we each stood those characters up and made
them… There was a chemistry there already, and
a willingness to volley. Then again, because we both, as human
beings, tend to be frisky and a little bawdy, there was an extra
layer of fun that we had while were doing the things that we were
required to do.
All the other actresses you share scenes with in the
film are black. How did working with them differ from working with
Kathy?
Well, it just so happened that Taraji and Sanaa [Lathan], they're
up in the top five women of their generation, as far as actresses
that I think have chops. In the same way, I have a really good time
with my daughter [Mavis], she's really smart, witty, acerbic, and a
little bawdy and crazy sometimes — actually,
much more conservative than I am. Now, I get to work with them. I
don't have to wait 25 years like I had wait to work with Bates,
after I recognized her back then and said, "We should work
together." I get to do that with them now. They are my
contemporaries, as well.
What do you see as the implications of the Tyler Perry
brand?
I think he knows his core audience because, for years, he wrote
plays, and this audience came around those plays. As an artist,
he's creating out of what he knows and what he wants to say. The
style of it attracts a very particular audience that bleeds into
other audiences. You'd have to ask him this, but an artist never
wants to be confined, so if you're a courageous person, you're
going to try to stretch those boundaries. I give him a lot of
credit for that. He steps out of his style a little more in this
picture, but the audience is a necessary part of the viewing
process. When you put on a play, you put on the reality of it, but
it's stylized in the sense that you know it doesn't exist until the
audience is watching it. A lot of his core audience is from a
tradition of call and response. They know their presence is meant
to be a part of it as well. It's naturalistic, but informed by the
genre he came out of.
It's been 25 years since you were nominated for an
Academy Award for Cross Creek...
I don't know, you tell me! [laughs]
Do you think African-American women are getting better
roles now?
You see more African-American [women] onscreen, I guess, but it's
hardly anything to crow about. It's not just African-American women
— it's Latinas, Asian-American women. The film
business remains the last bastion of close-minded and uncreative
behavior in terms of the way we see human beings.
So it was ironic when George Clooney name-dropped Hattie
McDaniel [Gone with the Wind] in his Oscar acceptance
speech for Michael Clayton.
I don't remember his speech.
He was trying to show that Hollywood has always been
ahead of its time.
I don't know what he meant. No other the industry is this backwards
in terms of not putting the best person for the task up to the
task, rather than assuming you're a specialty act. It's, "I'm not
going to let Rosalind Chao play the museum curator unless it says
'Chinese-American woman,'" and then they're going to make her say,
at some point, something about some noodles. That kind of
bull ----- .
How do you deal with this problem? You must get offered
plenty of roles.
I don't get offered a lot of roles. I deal with it the same way I
did at the beginning of my career. The power structure never comes
to me and says, "Oh my God, we think you're so great, we want to do
this for you." It's usually a maverick person —
a real maverick, not one of these John McCain mavericks. People
like Alan Rudolph, Spike Lee, Tommy Schlamme... I'm missing people,
but it's those people who come to me. Then it was Tyler. So a lot
of stuff I get asked to do is not worth leaving home for. I suppose
I get asked more than a lot of other people, but it's so not what
you think.
You've been very active in the Democratic Party. How do
you feel about this presidential race?
I have been on the road with Barack Obama for over a year now
— I mean, literally, on the road, when I'm not
on the set. I'm one of the national surrogates. I took off to do
that because I've been involved with elections and politics since I
was ten, with my parents. You've got to. You must. If you're a
citizen, you're alive and especially if you're a person of color,
you can't get anything out. I came from the left to the center to
meet Barack. He was talking consensus. Everything he's done, his
whole life, has been about consensus. He's going to help us get out
of the pit, the fire that the Bush administration has gotten us
into. For the first time, I'm working for something rather than
against something. We're working to forestall something. McCain
really showed his colors, how much he put his country first, how
much a maverick he is, when he placed Sarah Palin on that ticket.
But that's a different conversation.
