“No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful and he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear, but he will provide a way of escape” 1 Corinthians 10:13 is recited in the earlier scenes of Ryan Coogler’s genre bending horror film SINNERS and uttered in a quaint, white wooden church to sharecropper and aspiring blues singer Sammie (Miles Caton). Under the admonishment of his preacher father Jedidiah (Saul Williams), he is warned of the dangers of dealing with the devil right before riding into the fields with his cousins, Smoke and Stack, for the opening night of their juke joint. This scripture becomes a foretelling to the film’s narrative, and moreover the problems that soon follow. Encapsulating the dichotomy of genre, SINNERS explores perceptions of the blues and gospel music, which are identical sonically—but wrestle in connotation as blues was once deemed the devil’s music. In the film, morality becomes ambiguous, and malleable even, as Coogler brilliantly illustrates duality in his characters and their development while incorporating themes of Hoodoo and Christianity.
Yet it’s impossible to speak of morality devoid of the demons of white supremacy, the ideals of American sanctity, purity, and narcissistic self-righteousness that persist in the world of SINNERS. The film takes place in the Mississippi Delta in 1932–amid The Great Depression and the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany– which were inspired by the horrors persisting in the States. Characters succumb to the white violence, through brutality, voyeurism and mass consumption by Irish vampires looking to steal their talents under the guise of love. While the film is adventurous, fun, haunting and stunning, its social commentary cannot be ignored—amidst ghosts, ghouls, spirits, haints and vampires nothing is scarier than racism, or “white mothaf****” as Williams tells me over the phone.
Aside from awe-striking performances by Caton, Michael B. Jordan, and Wunmi Mosaku—Williams’ presence in the film rings particularly prescient. His words and impact echo in the film as counterpoints to Sammie’s decision making, and the Stack twin’s expectations and protection of him. The film opens and ends with him and so while there’s the initial belief that he’s harsh and unbending he garners curiosity towards the end.
Williams was personally approached by Coogler to play the role of Uncle Jedidiah, as he’d been a fan of his since the 1998 film SLAM, which Williams starred in and co-wrote as the film won Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and the Cannes Camera d’or. As a nationally acclaimed artist, he embodies what it means to be multi-disciplinary; he is an actor, and filmmaker, a singer-songwriter, rapper, and musician, and to many poetry lovers and aspiring poets—a consummate slam poet for the BreakBeat generation. He’s performed with Erykah Badu, Sonia Sanchez, Nas, The Fugees and De La Soul, and was a series regular in Mara Brock Akil’s hit show Girlfriends. Coogler originally wanted Williams to play a role in Black Panther, but Williams was at work co-directing a science fiction musical, Neptune Frost which premiered at Cannes.
As a form bending, multi-disciplinary artist influenced by the Black Arts movement, Williams ascribes art as functional often using his platform to shed light on Cop Cities across the country, critique both American political parties and decry war and genocide. Nonetheless, ESSENCE spoke with the savant on his preparation for his role in the film, his creative journey as the son of a preacher, dialogue, and the idea of art as prayer.
ESSENCE: You embodied the Black preacher in this role, but you’re also an actor, filmmaker, spoken word artist and fully immersed in the world of literary arts and performance. For you, Is there some interconnectedness between the former and the role of a Black preacher in the context of a Black church?
Saul Williams: There’s definitely a world of connections to be made between the role of not only the Black preacher but the role of the Black church in terms of being a touchstone of African-American culture, spirituality, and politics. Much of my relationship to music, poetry, and language are certainly connected to the fact that I grew up in the Black American church. My father trained as an opera singer before he was called into the ministry and he played piano and had a beautiful voice. The relationship between Black American art and the Black church are hard to separate because there’s so much that we learned.
Do you feel like that helped you prepare for the role?
It was definitely funny—I’d never played a preacher. My stockpile of research was huge in relation to that. My father hung out with preachers and so I grew up knowing [many] preachers. When they were amongst each other they studied each other’s delivery and cadence and had their signatures. My father was from Brooklyn and so there’s much that I can pull from in terms of understanding what it means to be a preacher and the relationship to the word. But I grew up around northern preachers and [in the film] we’re talking about a church where most of the members are sharecroppers. We’re talking about a different era, a different accent. So there was still a great deal of research and vocal training that had to be done on my part.
What would you say research entailed for you?
I’m familiar with a lot of history, but I think the biggest thing for me was accent and enunciation. Ryan [Coogler] was careful to make sure that all of the actors had their own vocal coach and those vocal coaches would give us recordings of people speaking from that region and era to tune our ears to how we should be. I’ve seen oftentimes [when] Black Northerners portray Black Southerners is oftentimes if they don’t have coaching, their go-to may be to portray a white Southern accent because that’s what you hear on television. And it’s very different. I had to go outside of the realm of knowledge that I had and dig deep into the 1930s.
You begin the film and you’re kind of closing out the film. Did that dictate how you prepared for the role?
I read the script and I was aware of it. Ryan was very clear on what was going to happen but the effect that that had on me was less than the effect that it had on the crew. It was also my first time shooting on IMAX and I hadn’t realized that when you shoot on the 70 millimeter, the camera is so loud that you cannot record sound. So we would have to shoot the scene with the camera, but with no sound recorded and then immediately after they [the crew] come in with microphones and say, “Okay, you just did it. Let’s do it again for sound.” We’d try to mark our emotional movements and everything that we did in order to give something that they’d then be able to cut and paste the sound to the image.
Did you relate more to your character as someone with conviction, or do you feel like you relate more to Sammie’s character in terms of his passions?
I related more to Sammie. I grew up a preacher’s kid and I had a lot of elders in the church who would say, “You’re going to follow in your father’s footsteps.” It made no sense to me because I thought that it had been made clear that you’re not supposed to aspire to that, you’re supposed to be called to that. So that was always my first response, I’d say, “Well, actually you got to be called.” But I fell in love with theater when I was eight or nine years old and then my defense was saying, “The stage, not the pulpit is my calling,” and my parents supported me in that, they sent me to acting classes and celebrated achievements I made as an actor. If they loved a monologue they’d tell me to recite it in church. I was very supported as an artist—by my parents and by the community. I didn’t necessarily face the idea of doing the devil’s work, except for when I tried to rap in church. But then I’d tell them I wrote a rhyme about Jesus. My parents had a huge appreciation of the arts and so I grew up around a lot of artists, going to Broadway shows and off-Broadway shows regularly.
In the beginning of the film, your character has Sammie recite Corinthians and you discuss the idea of dealing with the devil, but when Remmick comes to the club, Sammie says that you told him that the devil would come on account of his music. I feel like those are two different things. Is that exactly how it was meant to be interpreted?
I would go to the broader scope of trying to explain how I interpret that. Music has a lot of magic and spirit. That’s something that I have thought about a lot in my own life and in my relationship to music. Someone like Biggie making an album called Ready to Die and then he dies. It’s calling things into existence. Our relationship to music is more profound than we sometimes acknowledge and it is also part of our diet and intake. It’s not to say that we don’t like shit with racy lyrics—I’m into it all. I think what’s being said there is really that your gift is not only going to introduce you to a big come-up, but when people hear your gift, many will respond differently. Some will bask in it and others will rub their palms together. That’s true of music, film, and all of the capitalist industries surrounding the arts. [We have] to be mindful of the business and ethics of it and we have to be mindful going into it. I [really] think of performance as ceremony and as the act of creation itself is very closely tied to the act of prayer.
I remember speaking to Ryan on set, and he was telling me the story of how he started listening to the blues and grunge and that whole process for him, when Dolph died and in the middle of the story, he started crying. We’re on set and other people are busy setting up lights but he’s crying just telling the story of how he came upon this story. I say that to say that because it’s true for Ryan too, that the message that you asked me about in relationship to Sammie, that’s something that Ryan has to be mindful of too.
Was there anything throughout the makings of the film that you felt needed to be protected?
I saw a version of this film before the version that’s out now. Ryan told me that they had done a number of test marketing screenings all over the country and white audiences would look at the beautiful [scene in the movie that portrays intergenerational connections of Black music] and would say, “I have no idea what that was for.” The people Ryan had defended [the scene] to at Warner Bros., were [mostly] white too. He asked me what I thought, and I said, “Dude, you’re doing a film about the Blues, this scene is your guitar solo and you can’t take your solo out of the piece. That’s the part that you put in there for you, but I know you put it in there for us.” There were lots of questions about whether that scene in particular would make it to the final cut.
Ryan Coogler has been a fan of your work since SLAM. He wanted to work with you for Black Panther, and he personally tapped you to play Uncle Jedidiah in SINNERS. Because of this, were you able to collaborate more?
I was approached to come in for a role for Black Panther that I was unable to do but we didn’t actually talk then—that was between agents and managers. Part of the beauty of [Coogler’s] confidence in himself and in his work is that the people that he invites into his circle, he truly wants to hear what they have to say and how they would approach something. He’s not looking at actors as stick figures to put in the place that he imagined. He’s looking at actors as artists that can interpret things and maybe bring him to something that he didn’t imagine.
How would you say your activism and work as an artist lend themselves to each other?
In my mind, I’m an artist and there is a long history of our revolutionary and literary elders who have said that we need to be clear on the fact that art in many instances operates as propaganda. You may think that you’re doing neutral art, but when I hear your song, I hear your relationship to women. I hear your relationship to money. There’s so much that’s betrayed by you doing something that you think is just a “get-up-and-dance” thing. So once you understand that neutral is not neutral, then as an artist, you begin to make conscious decisions to say, well, I don’t want this to be misinterpreted, so let me make myself clear. That is what Toni Morrison did in her work, Nina Simone, Amiri Baraka, Lorraine Hansberry, Stevie Wonder did and does in his music. So it’s not necessarily activism to connect your gift or voice to your understanding of the times to speak to the moment beyond whatever fears may approach because of the fact that it may be controversial.
I come from a school of artists—that was the teaching of the Black Arts Movement, they said that art should serve a function, because the other side uses all of their art as propaganda.
In SINNERS, there’s this motif that comes up in reference to the devil that you know versus the devil that you don’t know. Do you see any of those parallels and narratives at play today?
Without a doubt, if you put it in the context of the film people make that sort of comparison between the north and the south. They’re usually talking about people in the north smiling in your face and people in the south being more forward and upfront about their racism. The ones that are smiling in your face would be the liberals, the Democrats. The ones where the racism is up front is of course the other side but behind them all are the same exact donors and we know that both parties listen to their donors more than they listen to the people; that’s why we don’t have no health care. Cop City in Atlanta has had its official opening, and that city has a democratic mayor. I mean, we know Biden’s role in relation to three strikes and prisons. I mean, it just came out yesterday that an Israeli minister stated “thankfully Biden was in office when this went down because he never once came to us asking us for a ceasefire.” When people are done deciding to settle for the lesser of two evils, they tend to forget that this thing that they settled for, they had already labeled as evil. Of course nobody likes that because of the fact that it requires work and thought, it doesn’t allow you to just sit back like the times ever end and not pay attention.
SINNERS takes place in 1932. Do you feel like the film corresponds to the times today?
The role of white mob violence. From 1915 all the way up to the Civil Rights Movement, white mob violence was the problem. In 1951, Paul Robeson came to the U.N. with a paper called We Charge Genocide. It had to do with the growing number of lynchings since Birth of a Nation had come out in 1915. The rebirth of the clan was inspired by that film. That’s where we’re at right now. A group of Zionists in Brooklyn attacked a number of women who actually ended up being Jewish, one of them even Israeli, who were wearing Keffiyehs and protesting. They were beat down and bloodied by a white mob and this has been a huge part of American history. There’s always an element of white mob violence as a threat to black people, immigrants, and indigenous people in this country. And we are on the cusp of it, again, as we hear of voluntary militias going to patrol the border.
You have a gamut of disciplines in which you excel at that include being an actor, spoken word artist, musician, singer-songwriter, and filmmaker. Is there a craft that connects all of the mediums for you?
I have a singular discipline and the exploration of that discipline in relationship to art and creative expression can express itself through various mediums. Sometimes I don’t have the words and so these keyboards and drum machines keep me company and then when I dive into that they might help me find words again. My first love is theatre, it’s opened the pathway of discovery for me. As a young actor my favorite part was the time that we sat as a cast around the table, rereading the script, breaking down what we thought the author meant, dissecting the times, dissecting the psychology and objectives of the character. There were so many ways in which I was able to travel before I ever traveled. This [fostered] my appreciation of poetry, I would learn the layers of meaning, and all of that enhanced my relationship to poetry, to performance, to art, to expression, to Hip-Hop as well. During the time that I was falling in love with theater, I was also growing in love with the birth of Hip-Hop and part of the fun of listening to a rapper rap was understanding the references.