Danielle Deadwyler on playing Mamie Till-Mobley in Till : 'Even at the nadir of your life, you have will'

Danielle Deadwyler, 40, has known Mamie Till-Mobley's story for most of her life.

A self-described "child of Atlanta," the actor first recalls first learning about Till-Mobley — and her lifelong quest for justice after the 1955 lynching murder of her 14-year-old son, Emmett — as early as elementary school. But even that long-held awareness didn't prepare Deadwyler for the emotions she felt when she first read writer-director Chinonye Chukwu's script for Till.

"I saw the script come in over email and I was like, Oh, God, I can't process this right now,'" Deadwyler told EW shortly before Till's October Los Angeles premiere. "It was a little bit of fear. It was a little bit of anxiety and nervousness about going there in general, right? And so I had to slow-step into taking all of it in."

Best known for her breakout performance in HBO's critically acclaimed Station Eleven, Deadwyler says she put off doing her self-tape audition for weeks. But after three or four reads, she was offered the role of Mamie and felt a "temporary joy" — "then you have a washing over of the motherload of responsibility," she adds.

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"I'm a child of certain civil-rights legacy institutions in Atlanta," says Deadwyler, who can remember her days as a volunteer at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where Martin Luther King Jr. was a director. "I didn't know it at the time, but that's the kind of energy and spirit working over [the film]… that's what got me into it. I came into it with a personal legacy."

Director Chukwu and executive-producer Whoopi Goldberg decided early in the production to focus on joy, something that can get lost when dealing with tragedy. "There is joy in doing a certain kind of work in bringing an awareness to folks," Deadwyler points out.

"The responsibility is in telling the story right, and in sharing the story appropriately. She was pissed. There's a loss that is not ever returning. That is a visceral experience."

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"I don't get to relinquish those feelings, because I'm a Black mother in America with a Black child," Deadwyler says. "This is something that persists. It was happening before I even got the movie, happening during the movie, happening after the movie. So sharing this experience — dialoguing with folks about the whys, the hows, the whens, the wheres — is just as significant as making the film. You want to get all of it right."

All of it contributes to the fire behind Deadwyler's eyes as you watch her morph from grieving mother to activist. The actor admits that her pathway to the character went through the toughest stretch first.

"I did immediately go to the mourning because that's all we know, right?" she recalls. "We know this very black-and-white binary understanding of her experience. We know that she made a significant choice that was the catalyst for the civil-rights movement. And we saw the image of his body, we saw the various images of her in deep mourning, but you don't necessarily see all of the triumphant awareness and the brilliance — and, specifically, the power that she began to stand in."

"This story focuses on Mamie's POV. And we have to understand that even at the nadir of your life, in the darkest moment, you have will. You have the possibility to come out of that darkness and become something greater, to do something greater. There is power even there, in the darkness."

Till is now playing in theaters.

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