ESSENCE Festival of Culture attendees were treated to a first look at The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat, the new film from Sanaa Lathan, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Uzo Aduba, and director Tina Mabry, over the weekend in our annual Film Festival. But if you didn’t happen to be in person on the premises to catch what “The Supremes” have in store, you’re in luck.
Mabry, Lathan, and Ellis spoke exclusively with ESSENCE about their hotly anticipated new project, which follows the highs, lows, and unwavering friendship of three women with dynamic personalities living in the small-town South across three decades.
Based on the 2013 novel of the same name by Edward Kelsey Moore, The Supremes is a classic rooted in sisterhood in the same vein of The Women of Brewster Place, Steel Magnolias, or Waiting to Exhale.
“I love telling stories about women with women,” says Ellis-Taylor. “I’ll be honest with you, I don’t get a chance to work with women a lot. Leading up to this film, I would say in about 80% of the work I had been doing, I was only sharing scenes with men.”
“I get excited about working with women and then working with Black women particularly – that’s even more rare for me. Then they started putting the cast together…Sanaa Lathan is a legend, so getting a chance to work with her, and I have such tremendous respect for Uzo’s work, and then getting to be directed by Tina Mabry who is from Mississippi, like I’m from Mississippi. It was all a great deal of pride for me.”
Lathan, who is already the star of a string of Black cultural classic films, hopes that The Supremes is the next to be added to her list of constantly replayed, oft-quotable movies.
“I want to make movies that are new classics and classics stand the test of time,” Lathan told ESSENCE exclusively. “People want to watch them over and over again and they cross all racial lines, everything. This on is going to cross all boundaries.”
“I wanted to make sure that this was a love story – but a love story between three friends,” director Tina Mabry shared. “Personally, I do have my own set of ‘supremes,’ and I’ve found that those relationships have endured much longer than my romantic relationships.”
“To me, it was very important when adapting the script to make sure it would translate in that we would be able to see ourselves just as women – something that would transcend beyond race, beyond sexual orientation, to portray us from a purely human quality. Also, I wanted it to give us the strength that we need.”
Co-starring Russell Hornsby, Mekhi Pfifer, Vondie Curtis-Hall and Julian McMahon, and also starring Tati Gabrielle, Kyanna Simone, and Abigail Achiri as the “young Supremes,” the story spans the late 60’s era, just after Jim Crow, into the early 90’s, and the twists and turns of life that the three women endure together along the way.
When asked what the takeaway from this film about love, loss, overcoming, joy, and friendship should be, Lathan insists that is for the viewer to decide.
“I never try to dictate that because at different points in your life, you’re a different audience member,” Lathan says. “I mean, think about movies that you love, and 10 years later you watch it again and you see different things, different things hit you.”
“I just hope people are touched in whatever way they need to be as we reflect back the beauty of the love story of friendship.”
“What people take away from it depends on what they bring to it,” Ellis-Taylor explains. “I hope that people will experience something that makes them feel less alone. I think for me, it is just reading it and knowing that it is a story about a community of Black women and a community of women that showed a great deal of resilience and survival through a lot of bullsh*t that happened in their lives. Hopefully, people see it and feel like, ‘okay, I can go home knowing that I’m not by myself in what I’m going through.'”
The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat begins streaming on Hulu on August 23.