Fresh off her win for best supporting actress at Sunday evening’s Oscars for her role in “The Holdovers,” Da’Vine Joy Randolph said backstage that she has learned over the course of her career that she could be herself, rather than trying to adjust to a particular Hollywood ideal.
“I knew I was always different,” the 37-year-old Philadelphia native told reporters backstage at the Dolby Theatre. “And so, therefore, I thought maybe I needed to conform to something else. Because when I looked at this show (the Oscars) for many years as I was growing up, I didn’t necessarily see myself there. Yet that was the model of success.
“So I was on this journey of trying to figure out how I could mold myself to that, because I though that’s what success would mean,” she said. “And what I have begun to find in my journey is that in being myself, and doing the work and staying focused and driven and clear, I could do exactly the same thing while being myself.”
Randolph won the prize for her portrayal of boarding school cafeteria manager Mary Lamb in “The Holdovers.” Randolph’s Mary holds down her job while coping with the death of her son in Vietnam, and she becomes a sounding board and compatriot of Paul Giamatti’s uptight professor character as the two are forced to spend winter break looking over a student unable to return home for the holidays.
Television viewers will recognize her for her role as hard-nosed New York police Detective Donna Williams in Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building.”
Randolph noted that the glasses she wears in “The Holdovers” belonged to her late grandmother.
“I knew that this was going to be a difficult role for me to take on and that it was going to require a lot of vulnerability from me,” she said. “And I knew that she was just someone in my life that would allow me to get right back to the center. And there (were) many women. I did a lot of research and did little subliminal messages, if you will, with hairdos and details and accessories beyond the glasses, giving homage to women from `The Jeffersons,’ Phyllis Hyman, stuff like that. So that I included all of these women who impressionized me and so that people knew that meant a lot because it felt like a love letter to Black women.”