Actress Tiffany Boone talks about becoming Gwen Fontaine, wife of Huey P. Newton. "It was really just me trying to search out any little line, anything about her that I could possibly find because she's a very private person."
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00:00 In the Big Sikar, you play Huey Newton's wife, Gwen.
00:04 Tell me, what was that preparation process for you
00:06 when you were preparing for that role?
00:09 Yeah, it was really just me trying
00:12 to search out any little line, anything about her
00:15 that I could possibly find, because she's
00:17 a very private person.
00:18 And so there's no interviews.
00:21 There's no-- there's a good two handfuls of pictures.
00:25 And a lot of times, I just have to read a bunch of stuff
00:28 about Huey and hope that somebody would
00:30 mention something about Gwen.
00:31 So it was a lot of reading and research
00:34 and trying to look for things.
00:35 But also, it was just trying to fill in the blank spots
00:39 with Andre so that we could make sure that she was full
00:43 and their relationship had a full, well-rounded thing
00:47 for the show.
00:48 So that's interesting that you said that.
00:50 And filling in those blanks, since you
00:52 said she was really private and there wasn't a whole lot
00:55 of information about her, how did
00:57 you go about filling in those blanks?
00:59 And how did you implement, I guess,
01:01 your own style or your own little twist to the character?
01:07 Yeah, I mean, for us, talking to Andre a lot,
01:11 we were just really protective over their love story,
01:15 just showing a Black love story like theirs.
01:19 And so for me, filling in those gaps was like--
01:21 I feel like it would be really easy to just be like,
01:23 oh, Gwen was just this ride-or-die chick who
01:26 just followed him around and told him yes whenever.
01:30 And I think it's very easy to just be like,
01:32 she was in love with him, so she just went to Cuba with him.
01:35 But I think for us, it was making it more complicated
01:38 than that, because it was.
01:39 And I think even in the things that I read,
01:42 people were like, she was the person
01:44 that he could be himself with and who really saw him.
01:47 And she didn't take any BS.
01:49 So it was like, how do we fill that in?
01:51 How do we make the balance between her
01:53 being this really fierce woman who, like, a lot of pictures
01:57 you see of her, she's looking like this at everybody.
02:00 You know what I mean?
02:01 But obviously, there was a softness there.
02:02 She was a mother, and she loved him deeply.
02:05 So we just tried to make sure that every scene,
02:08 we can show a little bit of softness, playfulness,
02:10 joy, and the hard conversations they had to have.