Little Rock native Ashlie Atkinson did research to prepare for playing a homicidal Ku Klux Klan wife in Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman, but some of the content felt eerily familiar to her. She was a baby when the film's real events took place in 1978 in Colorado Springs, but some of the hate viewers see on screen happened in front of her eyes when she was a girl attending Pulaski Academy.
"I remember (restaurateur and activist Robert) 'Say' McIntosh going on television to debate a gentleman whose name is lost to me, who was an out, white supremacist who was running for a council office or something like that. Say said he would debate him and instead just punched him in the face," she says from her home in Brooklyn. "Even at 10, I was shocked to see that those people were out and proud and believing this nonsense. And that's from my privilege because I didn't grow up around enough people of color to know that that was a real issue."
That said, despite good reviews for her performance, Atkinson is happy to distance herself from wannabe bomber Connie Kendrickson and her husband, Felix (Finnish actor Jasper Paakkonen). For much of BlacKkKlansman, she's the only woman around during Klan meetings, and Felix only seems supportive when she's ready to do some dirty work for the organization.
Normally, when I've interviewed actors, they often talk about their villainous characters as if they were attorneys representing their roles in court.
Oscar-winner Martin Landau told me, "It's not a question of good guys and bad guys. Bad guys don't think they're bad guys ... . Hitler probably thought he was a wonderful guy doing some wonderful and righteous work for Germany."
Similarly, Christopher Eccleston told me that he didn't view portraying the Duke of Norfolk opposite Cate Blanchett as the title character in Elizabeth as playing a villain, either.
"He's not bad. Elizabeth is a dictator. She slaughters everybody. It's just that we spend more time with her, so we empathize with her," he said.
But Atkinson doesn't cut Connie any slack.
"I wasn't aiming to make her sympathetic," she says. "I think she's deceptively kind-appearing because she is adhering to a social norm, and when we first see her, she's only interacting with white people. She's playing pretty little housewife to her husband's Klan meetings. There's no challenge there. There's a great old quote that you find out who someone is in the difficult moments. You don't find out that a racist is a racist until they're asked to see a viewpoint other than their own.
"Spike [Lee] has said something really great that I don't believe, and I don't actually think he believes, but it was helpful, nonetheless. When I auditioned, Spike said, 'She just fell in love with the wrong man.' It was something that in certain moments, I could hang my hat on initially until I found the other thing. It's step one in a discovery.
"I don't think Connie is being brow-beaten; I don't think she's being abused. I don't think that she is truly in any sort of way being forced into her engagement with the Klan. If anything, I think she is the one who pushes for more engagement. That's not just about Felix."
While Atkinson doesn't hold back in condemning Connie's actions, she and Lee still tried to make the Klan cell that real-life black cop Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) infiltrated convincing. They consulted with the Southern Poverty Law Center and tried to avoid making stereotypical choices. For example, the Klan are not simply a Southern hate group. In 1920s Indiana, for example, the Klan under D.C. Stephenson forced would-be state officials to sign loyalty oaths.
Just as David Duke (Topher Grace) in the film incorrectly thinks he can recognize a black caller on the phone, Klan members don't necessarily have Southern drawls.
"People expect depictions of Klansmen and depictions of racists in general as being Southernized," Atkinson says. She adds that actors like to think of clocks when they develop accents. It's helpful to her because most of the 70-plus characters she has played in her career have been New Yorkers.
"You push certain things forward or back, and you make certain adjustments about what sounds become long and what sounds are shortened and what sounds are swallowed," she explains.
"I definitely had to adjust some things on the clock to get the Colorado sound. If anything, I erred on Midwestern, but I felt like Connie came from somewhere else. But I didn't want to do a Southern accent because it would be too easy."
She laments she has yet to play an Arkansan.
SHE'S GOTTA HAVE IT
One thing Atkinson does not regret is collaborating with Lee.
"Spike's been in my life for a while, which is great. I like him as a person and what he makes and how he makes it and who he chooses to make it with," she says. "Playing with Denzel and then with his son (John David Washington) can make a girl feel old if you're susceptible to those sort of feelings."
BlacKkKlansman is actually her third performance for the director. Lee cast Atkinson as a cop for Inside Man and collaborated with her in his World War II drama The Miracle of St. Anna. You don't see her in the movie, but her voice can be heard if you pay attention.
"I just did background sound stuff. Spike's sister Joie (who has a major role in Do the Right Thing) and I got to play scared old ladies and looping vocals for characters in The Miracle at St. Anna. You see these military guys going around the corner in a Jeep, and you can hear Joie and I going, 'Whooop. Oooooh. Ooooh.' It was really fun."
Curiously, Arkansas seems to have prepared Atkinson for her life in New York and in the theater. As did fellow Natural Stater Mary Steenburgen, she cut her teeth at the Neighborhood Playhouse.
"When I was 13, I asked my parents to get me a subscription for The New Yorker for my birthday gift," she says. "I would just sit and look in the back at the 'Goings On About Town' and circle things. I say, 'On Thursday night I would be here and do this and this.'"
She started out as a journalist for Arkansas Times even though theater appealed to her at Pulaski Academy.
"I originally wanted to be an actor, but I didn't think it was an ethical thing to be, so I decided to be a journalist instead. And I tried my hand a bit at that and then realized I wasn't very good at it and that acting was the only thing I was any good at, so I decided to go back to that."
When asked why she thought acting unethical, she explains that she "was confusing the work with the things surrounding the work."
"I still kind of think that celebrity is a real mixed bag. I found it materialist, very self-serving. I didn't think it was a very good contribution to a community. But then I went to Hendrix College in Conway."
She's now proud to have collaborated with director Craig Zobel on the disturbing Compliance and the new CBS All Access miniseries One Dollar. You can also spot her in Eat Pray Love, The Invention of Lying, The Wolf of Wall Street and Rescue Me.
"I knew I wasn't ever going to have kids," she says. "It wasn't anything that ever interested me, so I was free to say, 'I'm going to go for this, and it doesn't matter if I don't make it. It doesn't matter if I have to work four jobs and quit them every time I have an audition and to make rent and then find another one. I was ready to support myself in little hovel places for the rest of my life, and I've been really lucky that I've gotten to work more than that and have been able to make a real living and a real life."
MovieStyle on 08/24/2018