Daphne Joy Randolph talks about her role in The Holdovers – The Hollywood Reporter

“People from Boston don’t mess around,” says Daven Joy Randolph. “I wasn’t going to settle for that tone.”

Courtesy of Conrad Pictures

Da’Vine Joy Randolph has played a plethora of memorable roles throughout her ongoing 10-year career on stage and screen. She first gained attention in 2012 with her Tony-nominated debut Ghost: The Musical On Broadway; She later gained acclaim with funny and devious supporting roles High resolution, the lost City And Murders only in the building; And its role idol It was widely considered the unequivocally most memorable element of the divisive HBO drama. But for her performance in Alexander Payne RetainersShe says she had to change gears and slow down radically.

“This character is very different from me,” Randolph explains. “I’m the type of person who is everywhere at once – thinking and speaking quickly. But this woman has a very methodical rhythm, and she is going through a moment of grief and personal devastation.

Its events take place in 1970, Retainers The film revolves around a miserly history teacher (played by Paul Giamatti) at a New England boarding school, who is forced to chaperone a troubled student (Dominic Cessa) who has nowhere to go during the Christmas break. Stuck with teacher and child is Randolph’s Mary Lamb, who runs the school cafeteria and is grieving the loss of her son, recently killed in Vietnam.

“I knew I had to find a number of skills and use them in order to disrupt my natural patterns and fall into the place where they lived in her body,” Randolph says of her approach to grounding the character.

Her first task was to devote time and research to perfecting her character’s Black Boston accent. “People from Boston don’t mess around,” she says. “I wasn’t going to settle for that tone.” She also asked Payne if she could cook on set, rather than mimicking her character’s work in the kitchen throughout the film (“I love cooking, and that helped ground me in her world”). The director also believed that if the year had been 1970, her character would undoubtedly have been a chain smoker. So Randolph, who had never smoked in her life, set out to master the expressive power of holding a cigarette and tasting it — a task that involved as much as learning to sword fight convincingly on camera, she says.

“I watched a lot of Bette Davis movies to get the casual rhythms and cadences of smoking, knowing when to pull back when the other person is talking, and how to do it naturally while I’m talking,” she says. “There are a lot of interesting details about how smoking style relates to what the smoker is going through emotionally at that moment – ​​it was a completely learned practice.”

Most of Randolph’s scenes are opposite Giamatti, and they realized early on that they were “really lucky” to have had the same formal training (MFAs from Yale School of Drama). “It was like we had this shortcut, where there weren’t a lot of things that didn’t need to be said, so we could dig everything into more depth, which was very exciting,” she says.

The intimate and somewhat unspoken bond that forms between the characters—against the odds and despite radically different circumstances in life—is central to the film’s ultimate themes.

“These three people were different in some way, and no one ever stopped listening to them,” Randolph says. “Due to this circumstance of being stuck together in the no-man’s-land of the school, they’re each able to let down their defenses — and these three broken people are able to help each other. I liked the idea that you don’t have to be perfect or have it all together to make it happen.” Positively impact someone. All you have to do is have empathy, and build a community where you can find it.

This story first appeared in the December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter. Click here to subscribe.