Danielle Deadwyler Honors Black and Trans Women and Nonbinary Folks in Her ELLE Women in Hollywood Speech

During her speech at ELLE Women in Hollywood last night, Danielle Deadwyler, who stars in The Piano Lesson, eagerly embraced the title bestowed upon her in ELLE’s December 2024/January 2025 issue: “The Witness.” As she told audiences at the Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills, “I was given the moniker ‘The Witness,’ via this humbling honor from ELLE. And it couldn’t be more apropos, because I am a watcher and a listener, who dares not to forget.”

Deadwyler went on to quote the art historian and curator TK Smith, who wrote, “Forgetting is foolish. Foolish and seductive.” The actress continued, “I do not forget women, I do not forget trans women, I do not forget Black women, I do not forget nonbinary folks, and all of our efforts, our crafting, and our labor, again and again and again. I do not forget.”

Onstage at the event, held in partnership with Ralph Lauren, Harry Winston, and TikTok, Deadwyler was inspired to speak on monuments, partially inspired by the premise of The Piano Lesson, which focuses in a family’s ancestral piano—a monument in its own right. Deadwyler said she hopes the film might “bring you urgently to a monument, one that is sculpted in past, present, and future. Sculpted in love.”

In an interview for ELLE’s December 2024/January 2025 issue, Deadwyler addressed how being a woman in Hollywood “is the same as being a woman in the world.” She continued, “You have all kinds of hoops and navigations to move through, and inequities. Black women are not as present onscreen as people would presume; the numbers and the data reveal that over time. We’re constantly striving for access and support. We have a crisis of leadership these days. But I think that we’re incessantly making ourselves stand firmly in the spaces that we’re occupying and learning how to advocate for ourselves in a real way.”

Read Deadwyler’s full interview here.

TUNE IN TO ELLE’S WOMEN IN HOLLYWOOD EVENT ON TIKTOK

Lauren Puckett-Pope is a staff culture writer at ELLE, where she primarily covers film, television and books. She was previously an associate editor at ELLE.