I understand the fact that love is a spiritual quality. If you happen to find a friend or a potential lover, it is a rare and blessed thing to find it, and it just seems like spitting in the face of God to go, ‘Oh no, but I want him to have… I want him to be this tall and I want him to do that.’ You can do that and that’s fine, but that’s a life decision. I just was not going to live my life as a victim of history because I know who I am and I know what I do.
As a woman in an interracial relationship, and with all my family and all how wide my roots go, I was clear why I was with that person - to the point that my mother was convinced that my husband was really black. Because she loved him so, and he felt so familiar to her, she just said, ‘You know what? I think somebody in that family…’ I understand that and I understand so clearly the scene in the grocery store.
Most people see people who are mixed race together, different nationalities or different cultures together, or same sex together and they’ll go, “They live in a fantasy world. Both of them probably deny who they are to be together. They know they want a man. You know that Latino man is just with her because she’s got blonde hair.’ But the thing that they don’t realize is that you’re more hyperaware of who you are because you have to be. We’re the ones that have the real conversations about race in America. We’re the ones that have to say, ‘Okay, you know what? We get to start off on the plane of friendship because we’re not dealing with abstract historical things that have nothing to do with us as human beings, that won’t make us dig deeper as a human being to improve myself.’”
Alfre Woodard Analyzes Her Character: When audiences first meet Alfre Woodard’s character, Joyce, she comes across as pretentious and arrogant. However as the film progresses, we learn her backstory and get to know there’s a sensitive human being underneath her carefully manicured exterior.
Asked how she thinks her character wound up as the type of woman who introduces people by stating their occupations, Woodard said, “Well, you know how people get. Sometimes you don’t turn into your mother or your father until you’re older. I find myself saying things to my kids like my grandmother said. You know, I’m an educated woman saying, ‘All right, don’t make me snatch you into next week.’ And my children turn and say, ‘What?’ I say, ‘Snatch you into next week.’ They say, ‘Mom, that’s impossible. That defies the laws of physics.’ I say, ‘You know what I’m talking about!’ You do that. So I think what she has done is that because it was a big deal to defy her parents, but she did it because she loves him [and] she has forgotten that.
Parents are always going to get that [way] no matter who you bring home. They’re the same color but somehow they’re just… They can say stuff like, ‘Just something about him I don’t trust.’ A black mother will say, ‘He’s too fine.’ …Or one will say, they’ll say it about women, things like, ‘Oh, I don't know about her.’ But the thing is, they forget how they felt at that moment.
I think she’s making up for what she did then, so she really embraces the culture that she was raised in - the culture of black elitism. She will have done her job right and not defied the lineage if she can make a perfect project out of her children. She’s already done that. They cut a thing where she says, she can’t even get to the fact that he’s white. She just says, ‘You know, I put too much into you. I didn’t raise you to marry a gardener.’ So that was a thing and 99% of the brothers would not be okay. It takes a character like Blair [Underwood’s] character where she goes like, ‘That’s it,’ because she sees the perfect picture.
Even if Simon [Baker] had Blair’s business acumen and all, the picture on top of the wedding cake it’s like, ‘No, it’ll look cute if there are two brown people on the top.’ She’s that kind of person and I could do her because I grew up around women like that. I was supposed to be a debutante. My sister six years before me was Miss Debutante and by the time I got up there, I was like a hippie. Well, they used to call us nippies. I was like, ‘No, I can’t do it,’ and I was a social activist so I was being reactive. But I’ve come to understand that it takes all of us.”
Page 2: Alfre Woodard on Reuniting with Sanaa Lathan and a Little "Desperate Housewives" Dish
