Chi-Raq's Teyonah Parris: ‘You have to be resilient to be a black person in America’

A sunny, giggly goddess with a sway that sure knows how to work it, Teyonah Parris is not short on appealing features. And yet, if we had to pick just the one, it’s hard to get past that magnificent mane.

Hair, explains the South Carolina-born, Julliard-educated artist, is both personal and political for women of colour.

“It’s not to say you’ll never see me with a wig or weaves or straight hair,” says Parris, who abandoned hair relaxers five years ago. “Those things can be fun. But you shouldn’t need a weave to feel accepted in the world. As a young girl growing up, I never saw images of young black or brown women with natural hair. And if I did, those images certainly weren’t promoted as beautiful.

“So now I’m on red carpets. I want to be the woman with big, natural curly hair that stands at least 1ft high. I hope that someone sees it and thinks, ‘Oh, my hair does that too.’ You don’t have to chemically alter your hair; your hair is worthy. It’s about self-love and self-acceptance, not primping.”

Chi-Raq review: Spike Lee’s call to make love not gang war

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Wow. That kind of moxy earned Parris leading roles in Sundance smash Dear White People and now Spike Lee's innovative, incendiary new movie, Chi-Raq.

Taking cues from Aristophanes's Lysistrata, the fifth-century BC comedy in which women organise a sex strike to stop men from making war, Chi-Raq sees Parris's heroine lead the charge against their menfolk's warring gangs. Their battle-cry ("No peace, no piece") sounds around Chicago and beyond while Samuel L Jackson's one-man Greek chorus looks on approvingly.

“She’s a superhero,” says Parris of her angry, sexy, ingenious screen alter-ego. “These are urgent issues for her and all of us. The fact of the matter is that there are still gang killings and murders, not just in Chicago, but in many major cities across the country. So you really watch her grow as a woman and assert her power to affect change in her community. It was fun to scope her out.”

Ancient modern text

Fun but terrifying. Just a few pages into reading Spike Lee’s script, Parris recognised Aristophanes’s 411 BC comedy, which she had studied at Julliard. The ambitious rapping iambic pentameter of the dialogue is supplemented with song and dance numbers and real-world corollaries. Among them are snippets of the voice of Michael Pfleger, the Chicagoan priest who campaigns against gun culture.

The title, too, is a scary composite: American deaths in the Iraq war from 2003-2011 totalled 4,424, according to an opening title; homicides in Chicago from 2001-2015 numbered 7,356.

“Oh my gosh,” says Parris. “When I started reading I was excited, for sure, but it was also intimidating, for sure. This was a bold project. And I was really curious to see how it would translate to film. It’s crazy how intact the original play is. And yet it’s relevant and appropriate all these centuries later.”

There was further shock and awe on the shoot, which saw Parris playing opposite the likes of Jackson, Wesley Snipes, Angela Bassett, John Cusack, Jennifer Hudson and rapper Nick Cannon, among others.

“Working with Spike Lee was a dream of mine. It was amazing to be able to collaborate with such a visionary. And then – ooof – there are so many stars around you. I have looked up to Angela Bassett forever. Coming into this industry, she was the woman I aspired to be.”

A certain recent election, Parris notes, makes Chi-Raq feel just a little more urgent ahead of its Irish release: the film was premiered in the US nearly a year ago.

“I am worried,” she says flatly. “We have someone in power who has openly said awful things about entire cultures, who attacks ethnic groups and entire religions and who is totally disrespectful to women. To be in a minority – and I don’t like to say minority because put them all together and minorities are the majority – is scary right now.”

Encouraged in drama

Quite unlike the sassy, urban Lysistrata, Teyonah Parris is a proud country girl hailing from Richmond County, South Carolina. A tree-climbing tomboy who, paradoxically, loved dress-up, her early love of drama was encouraged and assisted by her parents. Her father, an electrician in a nuclear power plant, drove her to New York for auditions, sometimes in the middle of the night, and at least once in a snowstorm.

After university, she landed a small role in James L Brooks's How Do You Know (2010) and a Broadway role in John Guare's play, A Free Man of Color, with Jeffrey Wright and Mos Def. From there, she decided to try Hollywood. She was not an overnight success.

“I was in New York and had a great thing happening,” she says. “I don’t know what the heck took me to LA. I think it was the sunshine. I imagined a life on the beach in between jobs. I was able to stay with family. I shared a room with my 13-year-old cousin. Twin beds. I had the most broke-down car ever. I should have had a bike. It would have been faster. I did all the struggling actor things. I put in an application at every restaurant known to man.”

She laughs. “You have to be resilient to be a black person in America. The thing about being resilient is being able to fall apart and pick yourself up again. And putting yourself back together that improves on what you were before. An actor hears ‘no’ more often than the average person. A black human and a black woman on top of that? That’s a lot of no’s.”

A year passed before she got a call-back. The role was Don Draper's secretary, Dawn Chambers; the show was Mad Men.

"I was standing in line at Trader Joe's trying to buy some groceries when I got the call," she says. "I went outside to cry. I was so excited. But the great thing about Mad Men was that I had no idea that the character would be the first African-American character. I didn't know that she would be such an instrumental character during the following season."

Multifaceted opportunities

Parris has just wrapped the third season of Survivor's Remorse, the hit LeBron James-produced comedy about a pro-basketball player and his often opportunistic family, and taken the lead in Love Under New Management, a biopic of jazz singer Miki Howard.

"You look at Survivor's Remorse. Or Blackish. Or Issae Rae's brilliant, funny Insecure, which started out on YouTube but is now on HBO. And you see multifaceted representations of the African-American experience. It's insanely exciting.

"I've been very blessed getting to work on films like Dear White People and Chi-Raq. I love love love that these are not just movies, but part of a larger conservation."

Chi-Raq opens December 2nd.