Jayme Lawson Wants to Show Us More

In a short amount of time, Jayme Lawson has been making a name for herself by seeking out impactful characters in underrepresented narratives. These roles aren’t by accident—they reflect an intention to pursue a specific type of project that she established in high school. "That was when it became more of a serious commitment to the arts," says the 24-year-old actor. "I began to understand it beyond just make-believe. I began to understand it as a form of expression, as a form of activism, as a form of liberation."

Her epiphany came when she was first confronted with the themes in the works of Black writers such as Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, and Pearl Cleage. "The first plays that I ever read when I got into high school were by these playwrights who were also activists out of necessity, out of the time in which they were living," Lawson says of these artists' bodies of work, which often depict the struggles Black people endure. "That unlocked something in me. It became more than just a self-serving act, which is what it was beforehand, and it became more like there was a mission or purpose attached to it. It became greater than myself, I should say, like a form of service to communities that are overlooked or marginalized."

Shortly after graduating from Julliard in 2019, Lawson had her first opportunity to put her ethos to work when she was offered a role in the lauded revival of Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, staged at the Public Theater in New York. She turned down two roles in Hollywood films to take on the stage production. Yet another opportunity quickly followed, with her feature film début in Farewell Amor, a 2020 Sundance favorite. Directed by Ekwa Msangi, Farewell Amor tells the story of an Angolan mother who, along with her daughter Sylvia, portrayed by Lawson, immigrates to New York to reunite with her estranged husband for the first time in seventeen years. Through the pains of moving to a new city and re-establishing a relationship with her father, Sylvia finds a connection to her surroundings through dance. "I love how Ekwa was really trying to tell this immigrant story that she didn't glamorize—she kept it true and honest and grounded, and we really got to explore the 'after,'" says Lawson. "They've reunited and now what? It's not like that's the end of the story. It's not all put together, there's some real work that has to happen here."

A far leap from an indie set, Lawson's next project was director Matt Reeves's The Batman, the highest-grossing film of the year so far. Starring alongside Robert Pattinson and Jeffrey Wright, Lawson plays Bella Reál, a young mayoral incumbent based on disruptor-type politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Stacey Abrams. "I felt numb for a few days," laughs Lawson, recalling her reaction to finding out she was cast. "Farewell Amor is such an intimate film and the locations we were filming were intimate. Then to show up to The Batman, where they're using multiple cameras all at once and I'm standing next to Rob or Jeffrey and I'm pretending the whole time that I know what I'm doing. But in the back of my mind I'm like, 'Matt could genuinely fire me right now and be like, "Who is this newbie, why did I hire her again?"'"

Lawson had no reason to worry. Bella Reál was the anchor of hope in a chaotic and corrupt Gotham, and her grounded portrayal sold the critical comparison to our current political climate and has likely secured her return in the just-announced sequel. "I will say I know that Farewell Amor helped me get that role because I had that opportunity to be so intimate on set and get familiar and comfortable with the camera and ask as many questions as I wanted to without feeling ashamed about it," she reflects. "I think that gave me more confidence to even audition for The Batman, let alone show up and book it."

Lawson's latest role steers into real-life politics, as she plays the younger version of Viola Davis's Michelle Obama in Showtime's new anthology drama, The First Lady. Weaving together the lives of Betty Ford, Eleonore Roosevelt, and Obama, the series jumps decades between the women in their roles as First Ladies and their earlier lives, exploring the pivotal moments that made them who they are. "We know who she is as this icon, we know who she is as the First Lady, but I had the privilege to play her before anyone ever knew her, which gave me some liberty and some freedom to craft her a bit more as opposed to me trying to exactly copy and paste her," says Lawson. "I had more freedom to go, 'Well, she's fifteen so she's not this fully self-possessed woman yet. There are all these things that she has to figure out.' So from ages fifteen to thirty, I got to play a little bit with her."

Once she got over the majority of her nerves, Lawson says she sat down and studied everything about Obama that she could, watching interviews and reading her biography Becoming, littering it with sticky notes and tabs, and making notes of her favorite takeaways. "One of the things that really struck me from Becoming was how she talked about swerving, after she had become this young, successful lawyer and reached the top of her dreams at a pretty early age and just felt unhappy," says Lawson. "We hear this often, we hear people talk about how once you reach that thing that you've idealized or set as a goal for so long and then finally get there and it's not all that it seemed it to be, and just how that affected her and how she had to make a decision to swerve in a way that she hadn't anticipated before, a lot of which she learned from Barack. I found that so wonderful, as another reminder to just see where life takes you because what you think you want to do, what you think the thing is, it may be something else along the way."

Time will tell if Lawson feels the need the swerve. For now, she remains devoted to honoring and magnifying the stories of Black women, and she says there are so many more projects she feels the desire to tackle. This fall alone, she will appear alongside Viola Davis again in Gina Prince-Bythewood's The Woman King, the true story of the women warriors of Africa's Kingdom of Dahomey, and will portray civil rights activist Myrlie Evers in Till, a biopic by Chinonye Chukwu about the activism of Mamie Till-Mobley as she pursues justice for the death of her son Emmett Till. While there has been a shift in Hollywood to give more space to underrepresented communities, there is still a long way to go to balance the storytelling scales when it comes to equity—inevitably, Lawson will find herself busy for many more years to come.

The First Lady continues on Sundays on Showtime. The Batman is now streaming on HBO Max. Read this story and many more in print by preordering our CERO04 here.