Tonya Pinkins: Tony Award-Winning
Actress, Writer, Producer and Director

Tonya Pinkins is a Tony award-winning actor on stage, television and film. Twenty years in daytime television, nine Broadway shows, including the original Merrily We Role Along; Caroline, or Change (Tony Nominee) and Jelly’s Last Jam (Tony-winner, Best Supporting Actress).
(Courtesy of Tonya Pinkins Website)

Tonya Pinkins Film, Red Pill will be featured at The Hamilton Black Film Festival (just outside Toronto,
May 28 – 30). It will also be featured at the Michaeux Film Festival (named for the first African American Feature Filmmaker), this year’s theme is disruptors, and the dates are April 26 – May 2 (more details to come to be updated here as soon as available!)

TSM: It’s so lovely to meet you, and thank you so much for interviewing for the magazine.

TP: My pleasure.

TSM: I read that your first love was writing. What inspired you to start writing?

TP: I was an only child, and my mother had me when she was fourteen, so I grew up like a sister to her. Everybody was an adult, and I was always around adults. I had a really active imagination and used to write stories. I read from a very young age and wrote my first novel from first to fourth grade.

TSM: What got you into acting?

TP: I think it was just my mom trying to find activities to keep me busy and not hanging out in the neighbourhood. My mother had me in classes to do articulation, pronunciation and etiquette to walk and talk properly. Where I grew up was considered being too white, and kids would want to fight me. I didn’t have many friends, and I spent a lot of time in my room. My mom would take me downtown to an acting school where the first things I was in were Peter Pan and The Sound of Music.

TSM: What inspired you to write and make Red Pill?

TP: I feel like as a black woman in America, we live in a very different world. We hear a lot in the news about black men murdered by police and violence against black men, but that violence is equal against black women. Black women don’t get the press. We hear a lot about the black civil rights leaders, but black women were really the originators of all the movements, including the Dred Scott decision. That legal case was pressed by his wife, who didn’t have the right to sue, so it was very much about this experience. Even though I’ve been in this business for almost fifty years, I walk into rooms, and I speak from my experience. There’s just kind of erasure of my existence like we’ll politely listen to you, and now we’re moving on. A lot of times, because of that invisibility, it means that people will say things in front of you because you don’t matter. I wanted to tell a story with the black female gaze on white America.

TSM: What would you say has been the most challenging part of creating the film?

TP: That I didn’t know what I was doing, and I have never done it before. For most of the process, I learnt things throughout the production and reached out and asked for help. I failed at a lot of things, and things probably took more time. It cost more than they would have had to if we had started with a huge budget and a great staff. I paid for the costs out of my acting work. As I got more money, I hired more people to help me. However, if something needed to be done, I had to do it. I had to learn right on my feet how to do things, but I love that because I like to grow and the challenge. I think the most challenging thing personally, and I’ve been wrestling with this in the last few days because the film is now going out into the world. It’s premiering at a festival, and I knew that the perspective I was putting forth is rarely seen and valued. So, as the feedback comes in, I am always just so honoured. When women of colour, not just black women, but women of colour going, yes, this is my experience, and I know this experience. People who identify more as white, it’s not their experience. The things that they want it to be are something else. They want it to be something else, but it’s just not that something else because what’s scary to you is not to us. I want to invite people to look at the world through my eyes and to try to feel what I feel. Most people of colour who have watched the film say that the violence isn’t the scary part, but it’s when nothing’s happening. That’s what is scary because you know something will happen, that’s terrible, and that’s what is scary.

TSM: If you were to shoot the film again, would you do anything differently?

TP: If I were to shoot it again and had lots of money, sure. However, if I were to film it again, and the budget was the same as before, I would do some technical things that I learned, that we were losing time every day taking too long lunches. So I lost a lot of time on lunch that was more than was needed. The person who was my A.D. was new to her. So, she was shortening my day by half an hour, and my lunches were too long. I would also not bring in a hair and make-up person for a horror movie. I was losing two hours a day with my ladies, who are main television stars. I had a really top-notch, hotshot, make-up and hair person. If I were to do it again with what we had, we would not have a hair and make-up person at all.

TSM: What do you hope audiences take away from the film?

TP: I hope that bipoc women go, “that’s my experience. That’s my truth.” I hope that they can see themselves reflected in it and feel that resonance, validation, and uplifting of that perspective. My biggest hope is that biopic women get it and feel uplifted and that it inspires other people to tell that story because it is valid.