I haven’t exactly kept it a secret how much I love the first feature film adaptation of a play by the late, great August Wilson, FENCES, the first of 10 to be produced by Denzel Washington, with the remaining nine to land on HBO in the coming years. With Washington taking the directing reigns once again, FENCES tells the story of a man named Troy (Washington) living and working as a garbage collector in Pittsburgh, circa the 1950s. He lives in a small house in a segregated neighborhood with his wife Rose (Viola Davis) and high school age son Cory (Jovan Adepo, best known for his role as Michael Murphy in HBO’s “The Leftovers” and soon to co-star in Darren Aronofsky’s as-yet-untitled next film, set for release in 2017).
The film is a reworking of a Broadway revival of FENCES from 2010 (the original Broadway production was in 1987 and starred James Earl Jones as Troy; the play won not only a Best Play Tony Award, but a Pulitzer Prize as well), with almost the entire cast from returned for the film (Adepo was not in the newer stage version). One of Washington’s co-stars is/was Stephen McKinley Henderson, a fantastic character actor, who has a long history as a stage actor in many August Wilson plays. He’s also had supporting parts in such works as TOWER HEIST, EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE, LINCOLN, the Spike Lee films RED HOOK SUMMER and DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS, and HBO’s “Newsroom,” as well as having a small part in the current release MANCHESTER BY THE SEA. In FENCES, Henderson plays Troy’s oldest friend and a co-worker at the sanitation department.
I recently spoke with Henderson and Adepo when they visited Chicago and got a chance to get to the heart of what makes Wilson one of America’s greatest playwrights and Washington of its greatest living actors. It was actually great fun watching a seasoned veterans like Henderson sit beside a newcomer like Adepo, and seeing how differently they answer questions as performers. Please enjoy my talk with Stephen McKinley Henderson and Jovan Adepo…
Capone: Stephen,you have a tremendous amount of experience with August Wilson, having been in so many of the plays. Tell me what is it about his work that speaks to you and moves you so deeply?
Stephen McKinley Henderson: It’s a source of great pride that a playwright came who speaks so well about the human experience from the African-American culture. What happens to you when you’re young, people if they think they see some talent in you say, “Oh, you should do this,” and they always take you to another culture. “You’re so good, you ought to do this.”
So you get trained on the great poet-playwrights—Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O’Neill. So each playwright comes along in you life, and you’ve really been preparing for this. You’ve really been trained to do this work, and then you get one who’s speaking this blues iambic, and he’s talking about life on that level you say “Oh my god, how wonderful to inherit this.” Then I got to meet him and work with him, and that was just a joy.
Capone: The whole reason I even got into him is because so many of his plays played here at the Goodman, and I think even one or two premiered here.
SMH: Yeah, that was the career of [legendary theater director] Lloyd Richards, who was welcomed in all these regional theaters across the country. Lloyd’s career in the American theater made him absolutely poised to bring all this to that, and Denzel’s career in cinema has him perfectly poised to be the one to bring August to a larger audience.
Capone: Is it correct that Denzel, in some capacity, is trying to get as many of these plays made into films as possible?
SMH: Yes, he will be the executive director of all the rest of them for HBO.
Capone: I can’t wait. In terms of making this transition from what you did a few years ago on Broadway into the film, it’s funny because most people don’t understand that you usually don’t see the front of the house or the street in front of the house. You don’t see them on the job or even the inside of the house. What was it like making that transition and opening it up just a little bit more than the stage production allowed?
SMH: That’s a great question for Denzel [laughs]. But it was freeing to be able to be in Pittsburgh in the Hill District doing this incredible work. It allowed you to be far more intimate, far more life-level truth. The same thing you build the stage performance from that you have to raise the optics of the space, now you can put it right here [raises his hand to his face], keep it right there, and the people of Pittsburgh so welcomed us to be there. So it was just freeing, is all I can say. It freed you to create, to work, to listen, to hear in a very different way.
Capone: Jovan, you’re the one guy who wasn’t in the play, so tell me about your audition. Walk me through the process of how you got this gig. Courtney B. Vance did it in the original production.
Jovan Adepo: My agents let me know that Vicky Thomas, who had casted me in “The Leftovers,” was working on FENCES, so they called her and let her know I was extremely interested because I was very familiar with August Wilson’s work, and she was up for it. So I went in and read a couple of times—my final audition being with Denzel, which is of course the most exhausting audition I’ve ever done but the most rewarding, clearly. But even in that concentrated time of 20 or so minutes, I learned so much about the craft just being in the room auditioning with him. It was definitely something where I felt a connection there just because how we were working, and we were really in tune with the scenes even though he was challenging me.
Towards the end, I got calls from my agents, and they’re like, “We haven’t heard anything back yet, but you know Denzel and his producers are asking how you felt.” I was like, “I felt great.” And they were like, “Well, they want to know, did you like him?” I was like, “Did I like him? Are you serious? What does that matter? Does he like me?” [laughs] They were like, “No, no, he’s just trying to get a feel for you.”
Then it wasn’t until maybe a couple of weeks later—because there are a lot of steps that you have to go through with the studio and everything—they found out Denzel was on board from the get-go. He had to make sure that it was going to go across the board. When I found out I got the part, I was, more than anything, thinking “I get to work with one of my heroes. I’ve seen all of his movies. I’ve reenacted all of his major scenes in front of the mirror, probably horribly.” Not only that, but I get a chance to be a part of an iconic adaptation of a play that many people have grown to love. It’s an amazing, rich piece of material. It’s such a blessing to get exposed to it so early on in my career.
Capone: I was going to ask you, how familiar were you with Wilson’s work before getting involved in this?
JA: I had read all of the plays in the [10-play Pittsburgh] Cycle except one. “Jitney” is the only one I haven’t read. But I was familiar with “Fences” because I workshopped it in acting classes, so I was very much familiar with the role of Cory, and I knew that I wanted to play that part. I was like, “That’s the part of all parts. If I could finesse my way in there somehow, that would be grand.” And fate and God worked it out so I could play this role, and it’s been a blessing.
Capone: What is this story set in the ’50s, in a segregated area of Pittsburgh, telling people today? What is the connection between this story and modern times?
SMH: One of the reasons is because it’s timeless. It doesn’t have to do with the fact of our times are like the ’50s. It’s timeless. Anytime a story of a father and son, a marriage, a friendship, siblings, it just covers all of the things that make us human, and it comes from this particular cultural perspective with a backdrop of injustice that unfortunately we’re still aware of it. I guess the other thing is, we’re in another time where we really want something to see that makes us feel good about the human spirit, that there’s not so much here that we can’t triumph over. And I think August will always give that, because he believed so in the indomitable nature of the human spirit.
Capone: You talked before about auditioning with Denzel Washington and how much you learned from that. What do you both learn from just watching him work, both as a director and as someone you work opposite?
JA: Patience. I would say, dare to make interesting choices, because he’s always doing something different in every take. It could be the most minute thing. He might just breathe different in a take. It’s just something really small, but it’s different every time. That definitely keeps it fresh. He always seems to bring some element of what he’s picked up on the stage in his cinematic world. That’s interesting for me as well, because I’m still trying to navigate that part of my career as well, which is also very fresh and new.
SMH: It’s that spontaneity that he has. It’s an incredible, incredible spontaneity, and the fact that he’s free to let you be the inspiration for him. In other words, it’s something that happens in the other actor that takes him a different place. So because he’s not working on him, he’s working on story, he’s working on this moment that we had before, so he’s able to be so spontaneous, and there’s no telling what he’ll do, which causes a creative ripple effect. You hear all these things. I’ve been around long enough that I’ve heard all kind of ways to talk about acting, but when you see it, you know exactly what it is, and that’s greatness.
Capone: I’ve got to imagine shooting a film like this that has long stretches of uninterrupted monologues or conversations, did he shoot this more or less chronologically?
SMH: Yeah, he certainly did. He shot it in sequence. And it wasn’t even about making it like the experience of doing the play. It was about having the immediate, emotional memory of what just proceeded. It was fabulous to take the storyline and have it building and building and building inside you.
Capone: I want to talk about two scenes, one with each of you. One of the scenes that I don’t think is getting talked about enough is the one with you and Denzel at the bar at the very end, because something is broken between you in that moment, and we know what it is, but it’s never really said. The closeness is missing between them in that scenes. Can you talk about that a little bit?
SMH: It’s hard to talk about it, but the thing I most enjoyed, most appreciated about it is that we didn’t do it where it might have occurred in the play, because we shared this bottle all this time, and now to be in a place where we had all the bottles you could possibly want, and we don’t drink together. So somehow, it helped feed me and the understanding that I’m turning down the glass. I am turning down the glass.
Capone: Let’s also talk about the most famous scene—the “Why don’t you like me? scene—which they basically turned into the first trailer. I’ve seen it the way James Earl Jones and Courtney Vance did it. I’ve seen the way it was done in the Broadway revival. Did you watch either of those before you did it? Tell me about doing that scene, because that’s the one you’ve got to nail.
JA: Oh yeah, I watched it, and even before I had gotten this part, just being familiar with August Wilson and of “Fences.” I’ve seen Courtney and Chris’s version, and in fact, I spoke to Courtney while we were filming this. He called and gave nothing but support. He wanted to see where my head was at. He didn’t know who I was, so he was like, “My name is Courtney.” I was like, “I know exactly who you are and what you’ve done, and this is amazing that I’m getting to talk to you. I’m a fan.” It was never a moment of putting any type of unnecessary pressure on me with Mr. Vance.
He just wanted to make sure that I understood that is that moment and this is a question that Cory has been wanting to ask Troy for a long time, because this isn’t the first time that Troy has probably dismissed something that Cory has wanted to do. And this sets up conflict for the rest of the film between those two. Him explaining to Cory why he doesn’t need to like him, and Cory trying to make sense of why his dad seems to be ruining his opportunity at a greater life. There are a lot of components that go into that that I can’t even think of at this moment.
Capone: I think every parent that was in the room where I just watched it was like, “Oh, that’s so mean,” but by the end of the scene that were thinking “Oh wait, maybe he’s making some sense now.”
JA: He’s surely making sense. That’s just how men of that time were brought up. Showing love is brought through taking care of the family, taking care of their children. That’s love to them. And the newer generation is like, “Man, my dad doesn’t know I’ve got all these problems. He doesn’t know that I’ve got all these issues.” It’s like “You’ve got to be tougher,” but not all the time. Sometimes you do need the affection from your parents because who else in the world is going to give it to you?
Capone: Both of you, thank you so much. It was a real pleasure to meet you. Best of luck with this.
