The Porter: Alfre Woodard Talks About Support For Sex Workers and Why She Plays “Mean” Roles
We’re heading back to 1920 with BET+ new series, The Porter, which is inspired by true events. The series follows train porters Junior Massey and Zeke Garrett and their friends and families as a tragedy on the job sets them on starkly different paths to better lives – and on a direct collision course with each other.
The series stars Aml Ameen, Ronnie Rowe Jr., Mouna Traoré, Loren Lott, Olunike Adeliyi, Luke Bilyk, Alfre Woodard, Paul Essiembre, Arnold Pinnock, Bruce Ramsay, and Luc Roderique.
Woodard shows us another reason she’s such a phenomenal actor: she portrays Fay, who runs the local brothel in St. Antoine. Her character is defined as sexy, direct, and takes great pride in living life on her own terms.
The series will show the history of Black Canadian and African-American men who unite to form the world’s first Black union.
BET.com chatted with Woodard to discuss her character, her support for sex workers, and why she enjoys playing “mean roles.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
BET.com: The premise behind The Porter begins with the death of a young worker, which sets the tone for the entire series. What type of other dramatic elements can viewers expect to see as we delve deeper into the show's first season?
Woodard: Oh, I think they run the gamut. We've got about six major characters, and we follow all those storylines through the writing and the show running of Annemarie Morais and Marsha Greene, with the direction of R.T. Thorne and Charles Officer. You feel like it's a whole series about them with all those different storylines. We pop around to their stories, but they're all interconnected in the community of St. Antoine in Montreal in 1921. There is the struggle to organize into unions, which we know gives people real life. We know that the porters help establish the Black middle class. But it also shows the striving of artists as we're in the art club with our talented girls — singing and dancing. Loren Lott plays one of them and does an amazing job.
BET.com: The dance numbers are amazing in the series.
Woodard: I wanted to be in the club, but they kept saying you can't be in all the different places. The sets were so beautifully designed and so vibrant and real. But we've got the subject of colorism there that will always exist, as long as the Black Cross nurses striving for how to build community, [and ask themselves] what is the best way to build economic justice in Black communities with the organization called Garvey Heights. There's so much there.
It's about our guys running that line, the train line between Montreal and Chicago. You get to Chicago, and then you've got Queenie, played by Olunike Adeliyi, who is amazing. Chicago was tough in the early ‘20s. You got organized and disorganized crime, political crime — all the crime in one city. However, you got a Black woman at the top there is Queenie. For my character, Faye, and her group, we follow all of these men, and you would think it's a male-centric [series]. The storylines were written where we know what the women are doing as well as the porters but at the same time [we are] understanding where women found their agency in a period where they didn't have it. Women across the board, not just Black women.
BET.com: As Faye, you're a local brothel owner who is sexy, direct, and takes great pride in living life on her own terms. What was it about the role that appealed to you? In what ways did you make the character your own?
Woodard: What appealed to me was the circumstances behind what made her a brothel owner. She's in charge of everything. Faye also takes customers as well. Usually, when you see people, they think of brothels as places of ill repute, and everybody in there is somehow shameful. They're going against whatever the upstanding thing they've been taught. But how about the fact — and this is why I took the role — people are complex, and everything is not what it seems. In 1921, maybe I liked having agency; maybe I didn't. Where's the space where I can be and where a man cannot tell me what to do in my day.
Faye is a minister's child and had an abusive husband who caused the death of her children in a fire. She gets to call the shots. I knew that it was possible that people don't get pleasure from intimacy and from sex. So how about that? How about the people who come in there aren't sleazy and skulking around, but they come because they are not getting what they need outside of their homes? They need acceptance, they need understanding, and they need all kinds of things. And that's what we're in the business of satisfying. Maybe this is a place of celebration and joy? And so that's why I took [the role] because I wanted to make sure that was [present in The Porter.].
BET.com: The show addresses Fay's health issues with diabetes and her choice to ignore the diagnosis. How do you think her storyline will inspire or push audiences who also have diabetes to visit the doctor more to get checked out?
Woodard: I don't want to comment on that because I stay out of people and their health issues. But let me just say this, Faye is a person who has been betrayed by people that supposedly were in charge and knew what they were doing, starting with the church and with her father. Faye is sort of a skeptic. She is used to being on her own and looking out for herself. If she stopped every time somebody said I think this is what you should do, she wouldn't be the success she is.
She is skeptical when Marlene comes to her, but that's beside the point because there was not much choice and knowledge about what her ailment was and how to take care of it. I think the thing for me looking on and playing Faye is that she actually sees Marlene wanting to help her as a loving gesture. She participates in Marlene nursing her because she believes in Marlene and pushes Marlene to believe in herself. That’s why she supports her setting up the clinic. Although she's kind of sucking in her teeth about it at first, it gives her a sense of purpose and responsibility. The fact that Marlene reaches out to her in love and then she's offering her that support when she's ill — I think that's a lovely part of their relationship.
BET.com: How has the character helped you to view the world of sex workers?
Woodard: I wouldn't have been able to find her, and she’s a small, small story and everything as complex as we are, depending on who you are when you come to any job, what you bring to work. So it hasn't changed it; it actually informed me. It made me think about unionizing and the fact that I have been supportive of the idea of unionizing sex workers. I think unionizing in life gives people protection and gives people a chance at a good quality of life.
BET.com: What are your hopes for the character? What do you hope audiences take away after watching Fay for the first time in 'The Porter'...?
Woodard: I never want to imagine certainly how an audience receives a story. My practice is just to be honest and fully embody a person — hopefully, play a part in the storyline that helps the filmmaker communicate what they want to communicate. After that, it doesn't belong to us. As many millions of eyes that will look upon this, they all have their own history, their own story, their own needs, and their own points in their own timeline of the life of what's going on with them. So I just want everyone to look at The Porter and enjoy the experience.
First of all, I want them to relax in it. Get whatever their cool drink is they want to drink, sit down and be with another person or a few people because you're gonna laugh and you're gonna dance. Yeah, it’s gonna be weepy, and you’re going to go through the gamut of emotions. I want people just to receive it and talk about it. Even if they think that that was bogus or dope, whatever. I want them to talk it up because that's why we tell stories like this for the healing of the nations.
BET.com: It goes without saying just how hard it was for Black people and POCs in the 1920s, but after being transported back to that time — is there anything from that period that you'd bring forth into the modern world and why?
Woodard: History ties into what you did last weekend, so you are a historical figure — how relevant you are, how you feel, and how you feel your body alive. Right? So it's just a different day, just a whole bunch of different weekends happen. Everything that we think is true now is true that and it doesn't matter what your circumstances are — we always have found a way to live, have joy, flourish, and run a business, right listen or not. As long as human beings have, we have been living the same story. I think one of the great things for us right now is that we don't think we are reinventing the wheel, is if you know your story, the wheel has already been invented. Strategize.
BET.com: One of the internet's favorite movies starring you is Holiday Heart, and with so many iconic roles under your belt — what is a film that you've starred in that is near and dear to your heart?
Woodard: That is impossible. You can’t ask me that [laughs]. But I love me some Wanda, Popeye Jackson, Miss Firecracker, and Mariah Dillard Stokes from Luke Cage. You see, I either play crazy girls or bad girls, and when I say bad, I mean that [laughs]. This is a thing — from the time a girl is three years old, especially in the south, you can be any color, and you’re always told to be nice, or don’t do that, or you shouldn't feel that way.
They told us that as little girls and so there's a certain kind of freedom in playing people that are misunderstood because they're not being nice the way girls are told to be nice, while boys can tear the house down and knock over anything but a girl has to be nice. Or even when a boy does something, he can say that he didn't mean it. You’re told that from the time you're in kindergarten. So I like playing those roles that subvert stereotypes.
Ty Cole is a New York-based entertainment reporter and writer for BET.com who covers pop culture, music, and lifestyle. Follow his latest musings on Twitter @IamTyCole.
