Exclusive: Rutina Wesley Talks Queen Sugar And Playing NovaPosted by Wilson Morales
September 16, 2016
Best known for playing Tara Thornton on the HBO series True Blood, Rutina Wesley has found a new series and character that’s complexed and appealing in award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay‘s OWN TV series “Queen Sugar.”
“Queen Sugar” chronicles the lives and loves of the estranged Bordelon siblings in Saint Josephine, Louisiana. The contemporary drama begins as Charley (Dawn-Lyen Gardner), the savvy wife and manager of a professional basketball star living an upscale Los Angeles lifestyle, returns to her family home – an 800-acre sugarcane farm in the heart of Louisiana – when her father has a stroke. There, she reunites with her estranged siblings Nova (Rutina Wesley), a world-wise journalist, herbal healer and activist; and Ralph Angel (Kofi Siriboe), a formerly incarcerated young father in search of redemption. Together, they must learn to rely on one another as they inherit the family farm and attempt to rebuild both the land and their relationships in the New South.
For Wesley, the role not only gives her a bigger opportunity to showcase a number of acting ranges, but she gets to work with her Juilliard School classmate Dawn-Lyen Gardner.
Blackfilm.com recently spoke to Wesley about her character and what separates this from other family drama series.
How would you best describe Nova?
Rutina Wesley: I describe Nova as a beautiful mess. Nova Bordelon, the modern day woman, and the journalist, activist. She’s about her world community as much as she is about the black community. She is the most challenging character I’ve ever played to date in my life, and I have been challenged in so many amazing and stretched in so many amazing ways with her that it really is quite the experience for me to be here right now in this moment on Queen Sugar. Also, getting to take this journey with Dawn-Lyen Gardner who plays Charley Bordelon West who I went to school with, and we went to Julliard together, that to me has been the blessing in all of this, is playing opposite her. That’s a true sisterhood that you’re seeing on screen. That is actually true as on screen as it is off screen. I love her so much, and I am so over the moon that the world now gets to see and love the woman that I’ve known for over ten years, to know and love. She’s beautiful. She’s fiercely talented. She is all grace and light and love and one of the most supportive scene partners I’ve had. It’s been quite the blessing having her to walk through this journey with.
I liken Nova to Mark Ruffalo’s character in Spotlight. That’s something that I really attached to Nova right away and that is because I feel like that she is that type of reporter journalist person that someone would entrust their story to because they know that you’re going to actually do right by them and tell their truth. I like that, as a journalist, she has to figure out the fine line of when you really start to care about something. You want to write about this, but your editor is telling you to write about that. What do you do when you’re like, “But this is what’s more important right now in the world, and I want to change the world, so if I got to change the world, then it’s not just me. Now, how do I do that?”
Nova deals marijuana, but she also uses it for healing purposes and that dealing with a teenage boy that gets in trouble because of the marijuana. I think for Nova, we see her navigate through, am I part of the problem or am I the problem? … That’s why she’s so interesting. She’s really fully … Ava really fully realized her as a true woman character. She’s really fully realized.
Sometimes we play half characters, half people. As people, me being a human myself, we’re all human, we’re not half human. We’re all human. We’re all a lot of things. There are so many things in us, all of our differences, all the things that make us imperfect, our flaws, are beauties as well. That’s what I love about playing her. She’s comfortable in her own skin and she’s comfortable with all her flaws and all her strengths and all of that. She walks in and she’s got to learn securities and stuff, which we’ll see as the season goes on, but I think it’s nice to see a human being, a beautiful black woman, a woman navigating through life and what’s that like. Real life, real life issues that I really think are universal that I would hope that people will be engaged with and want to talk about, want to communicate and figure out life together. Let’s start a conversation.
After True Blood ended its run, was this something that they came after you for or that you went after?
Rutina Wesley: They did come to me, but I did go in and audition with Ava DuVernay. I had known of her and met her before, but I’d never really worked with her in this capacity. I ran to that audition and I wouldn’t be surprised if I was sweating when I got there. I was like, “You know what? This right here, Rutina, is everything I think that you’ve dreamed about as a little brown girl wanting to be recognized as a little brown girl who’s dark and beautiful, and like, it’s okay.” I walked in that room and I felt so much love for her as just being an actress and just the love that she’s shown me just from my work and also the forty-five minutes after the audition where we just talked about the work and about life and about my journey as an artist and how I got to this point and how it started for me with How She Move.
She’s like, “You had a lead right out of school. What was that like for you?” I know that when she asked me that question, I know that she wanted to know my truth. She didn’t want me to tell her the answer that she wanted to hear. She really wanted to know, how was that for you, because it is rare to get a job like that right out of school. It’s rare. You really don’t know what you’re going to do when you graduate. You really don’t know. You don’t know where life is going to take you, and so I just spoke with my truth. I spoke how I saw a script that said seventeen year old chocolate-stained skin, and that was the first time I had ever seen chocolate-stained skin written on a script. I couldn’t believe it. I said, “That’s me. That means she’s got to look like me.” It’s like the little girl in me came out, and I was so like, “Oh, they want to see chocolate,” chocolate and all brown shades of melanin that are beautiful, which you’re going to see on Queen Sugar, which is what I love about our show.
She showcases all of the melanin popping off that screen in a beautiful way. The cinematography is gorgeous. It’s our true color. That’s what we look like. This is what it is, and I love that, never been on a show like this before. I was so excited to now be, ten, fifteen years later, ten years later and playing this character that is a fully realized, beautiful chocolate sister with locks. She’s just natural and comfortable. You really can’t pin Nova down because she’s so many things. I feel like that’s just incredible as an actress to get to play a woman so alive with life, so full of life.
There are so many shows on TV going great nowadays and we’re seeing a lot of TV shows specifically with black families. What separates this particular show from other shows that we’re seeing in terms of family dynamics?
Rutina Wesley: I really feel like nothing in Queen Sugar is sugar-coated. We look at the dysfunction of family, celebrations of family, joys, and everything in between. When we do ask you to look at it, we are just giving you a slice, a different perspective on it, a different slice of life, I like to call it. It’s not always going to be pretty, because life is not always pretty. I like that we are not afraid of the un-pretty. We are not afraid of the raw emotion that comes out in life sometimes when we go through things, for example, losing a loved one, losing a parent. The funeral happens and then life has to still go on, and how do you come together as a family? The family also could fall apart. As people on this earth, we’ve all been through some things that it’s just like, how do you navigate? How do you truly navigate? There’s no really right or wrong answer, but let’s really get into it. Let’s not tell each other what we want to hear. Let’s tell each other really what’s going on and how we’re feeling in the situation.
I love that in the second episode. You’re going to really see some things from Charley and Nova, the sisters, and even Ralph Angel. We’re siblings estranged and now we’re here. Dad’s gone, and now what do we do? We have to navigate that, and sometimes I’m the big sister. They’re not going to always listen to the big sister. Charley’s stuck in the middle. Then you got the baby, and he’s just trying to live his life. He’s usually incarcerated and he’s got a five year old, and he’s just trying to figure out how to be a man and feed his child. We have uncles and fathers and sons and daughters and loved ones that we know that have either been incarcerated, and when you get out, it’s like you trying to figure out how to walk back through life, how to hopefully not be judged from your past because you are a man at the end of the day. You do have a heart. You have a mind. You may be fiercely intelligent. You had a mistake in your life. How do you move on when sometimes you’re faced with a world of judgement?
Can you talk to me about working with Greg Vaughan. There’s more to that relationship than we’ll see.
Rutina Wesley: Greg Vaughan, that boy. He’s amazing. Nova and Calvin, yeah, that relationship I think people are really going to be interested in because Nova’s got her fist in the air on one hand, and then she goes home to Calvin who’s married, wife and [inaudible 00:10:47] on the other hand. I think people are really going to be like, “Okay what’s up with Nova, because she is really all over the place?” She’s comfortable with it, but you will see some more of that relationship. You will also, I think as an audience, I would hope that you would start to understand why they are the way they are. It is a true relationship.
As the story goes on, you will begin to understand it more. It will unfold in front of you as to what that is, because I love that we opened the show with people not really knowing what it was about until it was like, “Oh, and now he goes to work and back home.” Then people go, “Wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, so they’re not together? Wait, what’s going on?” You start with this beauty, the beauty of that relationship, and then we turn it on its head. Now as the show’s going to go on, it’s going to flesh out even more than that. You’re going to get to little petals, like the flower or like a onion, you’re going to peel back the onion and you’re going to see what is inside Nova and Calvin.
Greg Vaughan and I, from the moment we laid eyes on each other at our audition together, we clicked immediately. There was a definite connection of … We just clicked. We just got it right away, and I was really happy to know that we were both going to be doing this together after that audition. Once I found out we were both cast, it was just like, “Wow, that makes sense.” Sometimes you go into an audition and it doesn’t always work. When it does, it’s really, really, really nice. It’s really nice to have that.
Episode 3 First Look
