The Big Picture

Collider’s Steve Weintraub speaks with
The Piano Lesson
co-stars Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Potts.
Based on the August Wilson play,
The Piano Lesson
focuses on the family legacy and an heirloom piano.
During this conversation, Potts and Jackson discuss the challenges of portraying drunk characters, the honesty in Wilson’s writing, and more.

The work of playwright August Wilson has been speaking to audiences for decades. First, as a massive stage presence on Broadway with his historic Pittsburgh Cycle and now in a different life on the silver screen, adapted into award-winning films by Denzel Washington in Fences and George C. Wolfe in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Now, Malcolm Washington makes his directorial debut with Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, featuring much of the 2022 Broadway cast and starring two of Wilson’s original mainstay performers: the brilliantly iconic Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Potts.

Set in 1936, The Piano Lesson takes place in Pittsburgh during the aftermath of the Great Depression. The story follows the lives of Doaker Charles (played by Jackson), his family household, and their heirloom piano — decorated with designs carved by an enslaved ancestor. Potts plays Wining Boy Charles, Doaker Charles’ older brother, alongside co-stars John David Washington, Danielle Deadwyler, and Ray Fisher.

Collider’s own Steve Weintraub had the honor of sitting down with Potts and Jackson to talk about The Piano Lesson and Wilson. Together they discussed the differences between the stage and film versions of the story, the color and lore defined by Wilson’s words, and the very real challenges of playing drunk.

Michael Potts and Samuel L. Jackson Define ‘Challenging’
Image via Netflix

COLLIDER: I really want to start with a sincere congrats. I thought you guys did fantastic, and I thought Malcolm did an excellent job with this. I like throwing a curveball at the beginning of all my interviews. You both have worked on tons of things. What shot or sequence through your career do you think might have been the most challenging? Whether because of dialogue, camera moves, whatever it may be, is there one that always sticks out as a real challenge?

MICHAEL POTTS All the drunk stuff in this one. Whenever you have to play inebriated, it’s always a challenge because you never want to fall into caricature. You wanna make it as honest and authentic as you possibly can. That’s always a challenge because you’re covering space, but you still have the frame. So, you still have to work within that frame. That’s probably the most challenging.

SAMUEL L. JACKSON: Challenging. There’s a scene in 187 at the end of the film where I’m sitting at the table playing Russian roulette with another kid. We were playing Russian roulette together. I spin it, pull the trigger, boom, give it back to him. He pulled the trigger. It was difficult because the day we were doing that scene, the other actor had discovered his father hanging in the bathroom the night before, and he came to work anyway to do the scene. So, I’d been with him all that morning, trying to help him through that trauma. And then we had to go in there and pretend to play suicide with each other all day. It’s very, very, very, very, very, very difficult.

I can’t even imagine.

The Humanity and Honesty of August Wilson’s Writing

Jumping into why I get to talk to you both: August Wilson. All of his work is so important to so many people, and I’m just curious, for people who aren’t familiar with his work, what’s his secret sauce that has resonated with so many people in his writing?

JACKSON: It’s the honesty of his vision. He writes what he sees in his head or what he’s seen. The conversations aren’t censored or tempered in any way. When it’s angry, it’s angry. When it’s folklore, the lore is colorful and believable, like the stories we were always told about different people in the neighborhood, all the things you knew about them. The emotions that people share with each other come from a real place, not a made-up space.

POTTS: They’re humans. The humanity. All of his characters carry such humanity about them. That’s relatable. It’s accessible to any other human being.

Samuel L. Jackson Was Present for The Genesis of ‘The Piano Lesson’
“We started from the ground floor when he was just writing it.“
Image via Netflix

One of the things people might not realize is you worked with August back in ‘87. You did this originally when it first came to light. Did you realize at the time when you were making it, how special it was, and when you were putting it together, did it go through big changes? Do you remember?

JACKSON: Well, of course it did! We started from the ground floor when he was just writing it. August would go away and come back the next day, and he’d have five or six new pages. All the time. Even when we were doing previews at Yale, he’d come in with new speeches I had to learn that afternoon and do that night. Kind of crazy.

By the time the show got back to Broadway — because when I left Yale, I was done with it until it came back to Broadway, and I became the understudy — it had changed exponentially in a lot of different ways. The speeches were changed and everything else. I was in a whole other devastated kind of place when it was happening because I always thought I should have still been Boy Willie. I never had a case of the envies like that. It was like, “Should have been me!” Then he got nominated for a Tony, then he won. I was like, [Screams]!

POTTS: No, he didn’t win!

JACKSON: He didn’t win that year?

POTTS: No, he didn’t win that year.

JACKSON: Good. Fuck him.

Bringing ‘The Piano Lesson’ From Stage to Screen
Image via Netflix

You are both so fantastic in this. I’m so curious how actors, before the first day of filming, get ready. With something like this, where you have known the material for so long, and you’ve worked with August Wilson, what was it like getting ready for this one? Did you feel any added responsibility or pressure because it’s Malcolm making his debut, and it’s just an important movie?

JACKSON: Well, we had to learn how to get rid of stuff.

POTTS: Yeah.

JACKSON: When we got there for the first read-through and the first rehearsal, “What am I disposing of?” Because this is a three-hour play, it can’t be a three-hour movie. So, “What are they gonna dispose of? What part of my dialogue is missing? Do I care? Am I attached to it in that way? Or no, I don’t need it?”

POTTS: I was attached to all of it. [Laughs] I was attached to all of it because it’s so gorgeous to just say those things. The language is so amazing.

JACKSON: You reach a point that you feel, “Well, all of it goes together so you can’t take any of it out.”

The Piano Lesson is available to stream on Netflix.

The Piano Lesson Follows the lives of the Charles family as they deal with themes of family legacy and more, in deciding what to do with an heirloom, the family piano.Director Malcolm Washington Runtime 125 Minutes Writers Virgil Williams , Malcolm Washington

Watch on Netflix