WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Spell, available now on Video-On-Demand and Digital.
It seems there's nothing Loretta Devine can't do. From comedy to drama, in TV and film, the actor has portrayed a wide range of memorable roles, even as her singular voice makes her instantly recognizable. And whether she's appearing in Waiting to Exhale, Grey's Anatomy or Supernatural, Devine's always a welcome presence. That sentiment extends to her latest movie, Spell, in which Devine plays Eloise, a traditional Hoodoo practitioner who heals Omari Hardwick's Marquis after his plane crashes in the area, while also harboring far more menacing plans for him. Devine brings subtle complexity to a villain who is by turns caring and unnerving.
In an exclusive interview with CBR, Devine spoke about what appealed to her about Spell, her character's fascinating background and the roles she's recognized for most.
CBR: You’ve played so many different roles, but nothing quite like your character in Spell. What appealed to you about this part and this movie?
Loretta Devine: Well, I've been doing this for so long, Cynthia, until anytime someone comes to me with something new that I don't think I've ever had a chance to conquer, and I'm lucky enough to not have been stuck in one particular type of thing, so I just jump on it. Right before this, I played an 80-year-old blind stripper on P-Valley and that was unique and different. And this is a Black woman in the Appalachian mountains that feels that she is a doctor and a practitioner. And to the outside world, I know they feel differently, but she feels like she's doing everything for her community, so that was really what got me into it. And [Spell director] Mark [Tonderai] sent me so much information on who this character was, I just was driven to do it.
How much research did you have to do about Hoodoo for the role?
Well, you know, luckily the director, Mark Tonderai, is an incredible director and camera man and he sent us bibles. He sent me a bible explaining just about everything I could have wanted to know about my character Eloise, who is really 187 years old. She was a slave back in the original view of the character who kills her master and took the overseer, who is Lewis in the movie as an actual character. She was born with a veil over her face, which I had heard about in my lifetime from my grandmother. Any baby that was born with a veil was considered to have extreme powers or to be dangerous. And, anyway, she was supposed to be drowned but was picked up by a runaway slave and was taught a craft of root work.
And so the movie has a lot of root work in it. And it's all about using this root work, which is using natural herbs and pieces of herbs, and belief -- I think that has a lot to do with it. It's supposed to be American magic; it's supposed to be Hoodoo not Voodoo, whatever that means. But there are a lot of shows that sort of have these underlying themes now like Lovecraft Country. You see a lot of this where they use the Mark and the Blood Mark and systems which are supposed to protect certain spaces. So this woman has powers that she has used in her community. Now the community believes in it and they’re happy to use her as a doctor because there's not enough money to get a real doctor, so it's that kind of thing.
Your character is also very unnerving and sort of hard to get a read on. There's a caretaker element to her but she also has more sinister objectives. How did you balance those two things in your performance?
Oh God. You know, I think they picked me to play this character because of my voice. My voice is very light and airy, and all my life I think I've played sweet grandmothers and sweet mothers and sort of represent what a Southern caring woman would look like […]. And I'm really doing my mother and my sister and my grandmother whenever I create some of the characters that are Southern.
And so this woman has a lot of bad, but the director said he picked me from seeing me on Family Reunion, which is a very loving kids show that’s on Netflix. So he saw when I thanked my grandson [on the show], he said, "Oh, yes, that's the one I want." So it's amazing how people decide that you’re right for something. I do have, on my own, a mean streak that nobody knows but my husband. [Laughs]
I would never guess that.
[Laughing] Oh, but my husband knows.
There's been a Black horror movie Renaissance since Get Out. And this is the kind of movie that maybe a few years ago would have had a predominantly White cast. Do you feel the movie changes with Black actors in the leading roles?
Well, you know, from the information we got about what the writer was trying to create, and they used a lot of the patterns of a lot of different movies, because I know a lot of people connect it to Misery. But he thought about Deliverance and a lot of other movies […]. But this is about Black Appalachians, Black people that live in the Appalachian mountains that people know very little about. And when you think of Deliverance you go [sings famous Deliverance banjo refrain], and those were all White Appalachians, who were very different from the modern city people.
And so [in Spell, Marquis] is a city boy that ends up in my attic and I have a theory of motives about him, which has to do with his family that he knows nothing about. But the things I want from him, you won't even imagine until you get halfway through the movie because you think that maybe she is a loving, caring person, and in her head, that is what she really, really is. But she isn’t [Laughs], you know what I’m saying? So I think by the end of the movie, you're really shocked at the outcome, it has such a turn around to it.
Did learning about life in Appalachia have a big effect on how you played the role?
I think so. I think so because at no time in my character was I trying to be mean or was I trying to be evil, I simply had a line of beliefs and a way of working the magic that I worked to help people and to make certain things possible. And [Marquis] got lost in this area at a particular time when the blood moon was coming, and this is an arrival that only comes every 10 or 15 years, and so it gives her extra power. She's able to heal people’s sight, she's able to give voice back to people that are not able to speak by using these boogities, which are dolls.
But this is true legend in some areas, it's not just a made-up thing, it's a real thing. And there are people that actually believe in these things and practice these things, and I think that's what's more frightening about the movie than the movie.
There are actually some pretty disturbing things that are done in this film, the use of animal parts to heal and that sort of thing. Did that bother you as Loretta?
I'm just glad they didn't have me killing those animals. I'm glad they had John Beasley [who plays Eloise's husband, Earl] doing that. I did not want to do any of that, so they left me out of that part of it, thank you. [Laughs]
But we filmed the movie in South Africa, which was also pretty scary for me and very interesting. They would have this power sharing where everything would black out and you’d have to wait for hours for it to come back to life. But we shot way out in the woods, which was an hour’s drive from the main hotel in Cape Town, and when we'd have to work late into the night, you’d come back and the hotel’d be chained up and then you’d be like, "Who’s coming? What is going on?" It had a scariness to the whole thing, I think. So that's gets to the mood of the actual thing.
And we shot in one room that had stairs that went up into the sky, very narrow stairs. So there was only one way in and one way out. It was very hard, I think, on everybody. But Mark, the director loved the way the light would hit or the ways of coloring would change with those lights. And he did this because it was the attic. I don't know. There were so many things that were going on. We had to go to the animal ranch to pick out the goats and work with all of the animals. [But the goat was] real mean in one scene, because he ran straight at me. I mean, there were all kinds of things that were going on that were really scary. So I'm sure you could see some of that.
Do you see more horror films in your future after doing this one?
Oh God. Who knows? Who knows the future in 2020? Do you think we have one? Yay!
That's a good point.
We’re having our horror movie, right?
It’s been quite a year.
Yeah. It's been quite a year […]. It's just like anything you can imagine that shouldn't happen, it is. So every day is scary now. So I'm sure people will be glad when Halloween is even over, because it’s spooky, I'm telling you, so spooky now.
That's definitely true. You've appeared in so many different kinds of roles over the years. Is there a role you're recognized for the most?
Grey's Anatomy, I'm recognized a lot for Grey's Anatomy. And I was the [voice of the stuffed hippo] nurse on Doc McStuffins for seven years, so little kids when they hear me talk, they go, "Mommy, there's that hippopotamus." So those two things I'm recognized a lot for. This Christmas, any kind of family movie like that, where the whole family got a chance to watch.
The movies that are being made now are so different from the kinds of movies we made back in the day that had a lot to do with loving your family and simpler themes, I think. A lot of the movies now are very about race, conflict and all of those things. They weren't making those kind of movies back when I started.
What else do you have coming up, and is there any other kind of part you’d like to play that you haven’t done yet?
I always wanted to do romantic comedies, those movies back in the day where the dumb blonde won everything, I would love to do a remake of that with a Black dumb blonde. [Laughs]
I'm on a new NBC show called Connecting.... I have another movie coming out later in the season around Christmas, I think. So little by little, a lot of the stuff I've worked on is being picked up because there’s nothing else to put on TV or there’s no other way to see it.
Directed by Mark Tonderai and written by Kurt Wimmer, Spell stars Omari Hardwick, Loretta Devine and John Beasley. The movie is available now on Premium Video-On-Demand and Digital.