Breaking Baz: ‘The Holdovers’ Da’Vine Joy Randolph Pays Homage To Isabel Sanford’s ‘Weezy’; And How She Sacrificed Her Private Life To Her Career
deadline.comAlexander Payne’s The Holdovers is set in the last weeks of 1970 and, if attention is paid, you’ll see Da’Vine Joy Randolph pay homage to Isabel Sanford, particularly how the tv legend wore her hair when she played Louise “Weezy” Jefferson in the classic TV comedy The Jeffersons. “I do this all the time with my characters,” Randolph tells me as she explains how she likes to distract herself from “Da’Vine,” and of how she has sacrificed much of her private life to her professional life.
In her portrait of Mary Lamb, the catering manager at an elite boys school, she felt like she was “walking this emotional, psychological tightrope,” because Mary’s only child has been killed fighting for his country in Vietnam.
It was a case of constant checks and balances because she didn’t want her Mary to be “whiny and cry. Didn’t want her to be too mean and silent.
And so I realized what I needed for myself was to fill my world with other things and trust that would anchor my character and that I could just live.” So Mary’s constantly smoking as a way, again, of distracting “me from me and me getting in my head or thinking about my character in a certain way.
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