Danielle Brooks’s Lifelong Dance With The Color Purple’s Sofia

Four-year-old Freeya, who almost made a brief appearance in the movie (“Her time to shoot was right in the middle of her nap time, and it did not go well,” says Brooks with a laugh), doesn’t yet know how much The Color Purple, based on Alice Walker’s acclaimed 1982 novel, has changed Brooks’s life. It’s surely a story that Brooks, most well known for her breakout role on Orange Is the New Black, will tell her daughter someday.

Brooks, who was raised in South Carolina, was 15 when she won an internship from Bravo that invited a handful of teens and their parents to New York to learn about the entertainment business. There was some downtime, so her father took her to see The Color Purple on Broadway. “I was mind-blown to see people that looked like me in a professional setting, because people who grow up in small towns like myself…there was no one that was doing this,” says Brooks. “I was so taken aback to see that there were possibilities for this theater thing that I loved, and I just became obsessed with the story.”

After studying at Juilliard and then getting her big break on Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, Brooks made her Broadway debut in a 2015 revival of The Color Purple, playing the brash, fearless Sofia. Now she’s reprised the role for the hotly anticipated new movie adaptation, which hits theaters on Christmas Day. In it, Brooks brings Sofia to life for a new generation, costarring with Fantasia Barrino and Taraji P. Henson in the epic telling of a group of Black women facing and overcoming adversity in the South in the early 1900s. Says Brooks, “To get to do that again for somebody that will now be that 15-year-old girl from that small town, to get for them to see me now, to help to fulfill their dream by seeing me in this position—that’s a big deal.”

For the Broadway production of The Color Purple, Brooks was nominated for a Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical, and the cast won a Grammy for best musical theater album. And yet Brooks says that getting to play Sofia in the film by director Blitz Bazawule was “not an easy road, by any means.” She first had a meeting with Bazawule, and then was asked to put herself on tape, performing Sofia’s iconic song “Hell No!”

“There’s this part of you, the ego comes up, and you’re like, ‘I won a Grammy with y’all doing this. Why are y’all making me sing? My voice hasn’t changed,’” she says. “But I kept telling myself, ‘Do not get in the way of your blessing.’”

So she put herself on tape, and then, after hearing about another actor who’d done the same thing for a different project, she wrote a letter to Bazawule, expressing how much she cared about the character. “And even if I wasn’t the person for his movie, I wish it and pray it the best,” she says.