Sofia may have had to fight all her life, but in the newest movie musical adaptation of “The Color Purple,” star Danielle Brooks recently shared how she had to fight through pain to bring her character to life.
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*Spoiler alerts ahead*
Taking on the role of the aforementioned fiesty character, Brooks revealed that during the process of filming the heartbreaking scene where she defies a white woman, gets severely beaten, and ultimately thrown in jail—she had to go to physical therapy and see a chiropractor due to the strain on her body.
“I ended up having to do that scene over the course of two days for multiple hours a day, and it pulled my back out,” Brooks told Indiewire. “Swinging back and forth trying to get the mob off of me. Of course, we have an incredible stage combat leader [stunt coordinator Mark Hicks] and his crew were fabulous, but doing it over and over, that really took me out, where I had to do physical therapy and go to the chiropractor for a few weeks to recover while still having to work.”
She continued:
“When we did the mob scene on Broadway, you don’t even see it. You just see me come down center stage and fall to my knees, and then you’ll see I lift my head up and now I’ve transformed into a new version, a downtrodden, spirit-stolen Sofia, which I can sustain for a year.
But it’s much different doing [it for real], and having 10 to 15 guys surrounding you and you wanting to put everything in it because you want it to make sense from every angle, to not feel like you phoned it in. I pride myself on being a physical actor. That’s where I live. I love finding how I can use all of my body for the character. I just want to use everything that I can.”
Though the scene was daunting both physically and mentally for Brooks, as she previously told The Root, the experience shooting the film as a whole was overwhelmingly positive and made her revel in the beauty of “what God had done” through the project.
“Being around that tree [at the end], that was our first day of shooting. And to see all of our Black skin in white and be wrapped around this tree that we shot in Savannah, Georgia—I’m sure a lot of our ancestors were there that day,” she said. “That was very special. And just to be there with Miss Oprah and the team. And then celebrating ending with the Electric Slide. There ain’t never been a film to have the experience that we are having right now, and I know that’s my ‘look, what God has done’ moment.”
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