Danielle Deadwyler Dishes On Rocking Cornrows In '40 Acres'

Danielle Deadwyler’s captivating performances in films like The Harder They Fall, Till, and her most recent bad a** role—she plays Hailey in the dystopian thriller 40 Acres—are proof that the award-nominated actress won’t be placed into a box. While all of these characters are women with the charge to lead, protect and prove, they’re different in their own right.

Hailey Freeman, her partner and kids are separated by the outside world by seemingly impenetrable defenses. Hailey is the matriarch of the family. As a unit, they tend to their crops while maintaining intense training sessions and utilizing the knowledge of their ancestors to live off the land. When their peace is interrupted by colonizers, they must fight back to protect their family.

I caught up with Deadwyler during the press junket for R.T. Thorne-directed film. She talked about the freedom of being able to wear cornrows while filming the post-war flick, the invisible labor that Black women carry, and what reparations would look like now.

“To be raw, right?” she responds when I ask her about stripping down to her plaits to play Hailey. “Who wants to have all the things on all the time?” She continued, “There’s a weight to that, and I’m interested in people who are in characters and women and figures that are just trying to be their most, their real selves.”

Being able to be vulnerable and weightless is something she values. “I think that’s something that interest interests me because You know, we, we bear invisible weights very much, in, in our current place in the world, in our communities, the labor of Black womanhood is something that’s been, you know, critical in my artistic life from the performance art realm to film and TV realm, and so, we deserve the ability to, to see on screen what you look like, what we feel like in our most natural state, and so I love a good a good straight back.” She laughs while joking about feeling the air on her scalp.

“I just read this article in The Guardian the other day talking about how the tariffs are really impacting motherhood, really impacting the role of women, because economically, all that trickles down into everything that happens inside of the labor of a household,” she says.

Danielle Deadwyler Stars In ’40 Acres’

Deadwyler is clear on the expectations placed on Black women—there are myriad roles.

“[We take care of] the wellness and and the rearing of our children to the wellness of our family that extends to thinking about this generation who’s trying to caretake for the elders in the family, as well as caretaking for the children,” she says. “And then how the hell do you caretake for yourself?”

For Deadwyler, self-care looks like “quietude.” She called it a “redeeming quality” of her “self-recovery and wellness,” and she pairs it with meditation and breathing. “This is a moment that we really need to hone in on our breath. That’s the thing that connects all human beings,” Deadwyler notes. “Everybody needs that. That’s the beginning of your day, that’s the close of your day, that’s the thing that connects you to the present. If we took a breath for…how we engage with people, things would be very different. I know if we’d stop and take a breath and a beat before we react, a lot of times we probably would be in a better place.”

For me, the term “40 acres” has always been synonymous with reparations. What does Deadwyler think?

“I’ve read the Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article, and I think that reparations should come in myriad ways,” explained Deadwyler. “Financial, educational, I think it’s a dynamic, it’s not a one-size-fits-all.”

Catch Danielle Deadwyler in 40 Acres, out now.