| By Fred Topel
In Theaters Feb 3
|
It may seem like Alfre Woodard is too busy keeping secrets on Wisteria Lane to do anything else, but she managed to have a movie coming out while she’s still on Desperate Housewives. She plays Joyce, a socialite mother pushing her daughter to marry wealthy in Something New. Her daughter (Sanaa Lathan) is in love with a white man.
As half of an interracial couple herself, Woodard could relate to the story. “I think the thing that’s familiar is that when you meet somebody - and it can just be a friend, not even a potential lover - when you feel like ‘I get that person,’ you go with it,” Woodard said. “I know people that won’t have tall friends because they have to look up all the time because that’s their egos. But then I would miss out on all my really cool friends that are tall. So I’ve never been a person that resisted the impulse when I felt something in that person that would make me more myself. If you happen to find a friend or a potential lover, it is a rare and blessed thing to find it and it just seems like spitting in the face of God to go, ‘Oh no, but I want him to have…, I want him to be this tall and I want him to do that.’”
Social pressures are a given, no matter how progressive our culture has become. But Woodard found that once people got to know her husband, Roderick Spencer, they forgot about race. “My mother was convinced that my husband was really black, because she loved him so, and he felt so familiar to her. She just said, ‘You know what? I think somebody in that family [was black]. Most people see people who are mixed race together, different nationalities or different cultures together, or same sex together and they’ll go, ‘They live in a fantasy world. Both of them probably deny who they are to be together. They know they want a man. You know that Latino man is just with her because she’s got blonde hair.’ But the thing that they don’t realize is that you’re more hyperaware of who you are because you have to be.”
Ultimately, race is not a concern to Joyce. It’s prestige. She’d be happy to see her daughter with a wealthy Caucasian, but in this case the beau is a landscaper. Not what Joyce had in mind. “Parents are always going to get that, no matter who you bring home, they’re the same color but they can say stuff like, ‘Just something about him I don’t trust. He’s too fine. I don't know if he’s…’ because they think [if he’s] fine, he ain’t never gonna be real and people gonna be asking all that. Or one’ll say, they’ll say it about women, things like, ‘Oh, I don't know about her.’ They cut a [scene] where she says, she can’t even get to the fact that she’s white, she just says, ‘You know, I put too much into you. I didn’t raise you to marry a gardener.’ So that was a thing and 99% of the brothers would not be okay.”
Woodard found a connection with Joyce because she grew up in a similar world of debutantes and the social elite. “I was supposed to be a debutante. My sister six years before me was Miss Debutante. And by the time I got up there, I was like a hippy. I was like, ‘No, I can’t do it’ and I was a social activist. So I had women around me that my mother protected me from when I was a girl and said to me, ‘Yeah, she’s a little bullsh** but she’s nice.’ I have girlfriend s that would say - because I have friends who had dirt floors in the same community but blocks away around all that - I had girlfriends who I liked and felt like sisters too were saying stuff like, ‘Oh, why are you talking to her? She brings her lunch.’ So anyway, I love people, whatever’s going on with them, but I wanted to be able to do Joyce because I thought that I could bring her to the screen and make the Joyces laugh at themselves.”
It’s unlikely that race will become an issue on Desperate Housewives. “You know, Wisteria Lane is a fantasy world. It’s the Eagle state. Those people are too involved again, they’re like Joyce, they’re too involved with themselves to even notice race.”
In recent episodes of Housewives, the tension has heated up between Woodard’s character, Betty Applewhite, and Bree Van De Kamp. Expect more of that in episodes to come. “You know what? That hussy. I picked her drunk butt up off the street and then she’s going to turn on me? Well, it look like I got scared because I’m hiding a lot of stuff there. I got scared, called, ‘Hey Edie? I think I want to sell my house.’ But Brie is in for it right now.”
Woodard relates to Betty Applewhite because she protects her son no matter what bad deeds he has done. “Black people don’t throw each other out, even if you’ve got frailties. We’ll talk about each other but we won’t throw each other out. So I actually love people like Betty. I think they’re ridiculous in their attitudes, and I have a few friends who are Betty like.”
Something New opens February 3. Desperate Housewives airs Sundays at 9 p.m. |
