‘THR Presents’ virtual screening + Q&A series with Mahalia star Danielle Brooks, who discusses the path to play Mahalia Jackson in the Emmy-nominated biopic - presented by LifetimeTV
“Sometimes people really are the mouthpiece for what God has next to you,” Brooks says, remembering being told by Hudson, as well as her successor in the Broadway show, Jennifer Holiday, that she should play the Queen of Gospel one day.
“We were in rehearsal and he’s like, ‘What do you want to do next?’ and I was like, ‘I want to play Mahalia Jackson.’ And he was like, ‘I want to direct Mahalia Jackson.’ We just shared our dreams and what we wanted to do next in our future,” Brooks says, adding that as things came to fruition, she was proud to be a part of a project she’d hoped for “as a little girl.”
“When Lifetime came to us… we had to try and decide what’s the best story to tell,” recalls Berman. “Is it from birth to death? Is it her relationships? Is it just her singing success? We came to this idea that Mahalia was a woman who got her guidance from God. She listened to him… and she made a vow to him to only sing gospel music and not to sing secular music. And she lived by that and her faith really drove her in everything she did. So that was the anchor of the story.
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