Jones: In the ’90s, because of my name and the way I looked, I’d go to castings and people would make assumptions about what I was going to look like. What did you make of how Black identity was handled in “On the Rocks”? It’s not really the key part of the storyline or explicitly mentioned. I feel like, from the pipeline studio level to the casting level to the development level, everybody in the business is moving toward showing better and more accurate representation of the actual demography in this country, including women and women of color. Because the truth is, there’s still some of it, it’s definitely better. I try to take those things in stride, and I’ve tried to let it build character and not bitterness. Jones: I’ve had that experience many times in my career. Rashida, in “On the Rocks,” you tell Bill Murray, who plays your womanizing father, “You have to start listening to women’s voices.” Have you had that experience personally? I’m grateful doesn’t mean I have to be walked over. I’m grateful to be here, and so many people don’t get to be here, but just because I struggled with too, because I don’t want to seem ungrateful. Rashida Jones: How did you, at such a young age, know that you had to protect that?įishback: I think, ultimately, I knew that if I didn’t have anything else, I have my voice. This is my voice, and if you want to use my concept, then say that the original writer does not approve of this.” In other theater companies, they would try to change and they would call it “editing.” I would text them and say, “This is my piece you can’t remove me. How do you want to say it?” I think that stayed with me, so I would navigate the world moving forward knowing I had a voice. I was 15 and learning about myself onstage, and they would say, “Your voice matters. I started acting at the MCC Youth Company, where they took inner-city youth from around New York. Having a big heavy monologue to dig into and having to talk directly to an audience was probably the first time that I felt like I was capable of something great that could have an impact on people.ĭominique Fishback: My mom is a schoolteacher, and I would write poems when I was 12, and she would say, “Oh, my goodness, whereĭid that come from?” I always felt like I had something. One of them was “For Colored Girls.” That was the first time where I remember feeling that, if you work really hard and you work with a good director and a great cast, you can make something that feels intimate, personal and yours, but that belongs to this longer lineage of greatness and of artistry. I was dealing with some depression in my sophomore year in college and I did a couple of plays. When was the first time you remember feeling seen for your work? The two actors discuss how they developed the confidence to take control of their own narrative. The actor, playwright and poet learned the value of her voice while coming up in the theater, as she experienced incidents of her work being “edited,” when in her estimation her perspective was actually being erased. “People are anxious to be, ‘What do you think? What do you have to say?’ There is an appetite now, which is really nice,” Jones says.ĭominique Fishback, who has earned Oscar buzz with her breakout role as Deborah Johnson in “Judas and the Black Messiah,” hasn’t been in Hollywood as long, but she’s faced similar obstacles. Over the past two decades, the writer, producer, director and “On the Rocks” star has seen a shift.
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