Friday Flashback: Alfre Woodard

This week in our Friday Flashback series, we are offering a previously unreleased conversation from a past HamptonsFilm event. 


At our 27th Annual Hamptons International Film Festival last fall, we presented Chinonye Chukwu‘s CLEMENCY, starring the incomparable Alfre Woodard. CLEMENCY received critical praise at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was awarded the Grand Jury Prize.

At HIFF27, Alfre Woodard sat down with Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson for one of our signature conversations. For her work as an actor, Alfre Woodard has received an Oscar® nomination, four Emmy Awards and seventeen Emmy nominations, three SAG Awards and a Golden Globe. Woodard’s illustrious body of work includes her Oscar-nominated performance in Martin Ritt’s CROSS CREEK; HBO’s MANDELA (ACE Award); Lawrence Kasdan’s GRAND CANYON; John Sayles’ PASSION FISH; Spike Lee’s CROOKLYN; Gina Prince-Bythewood’s LOVE AND BASKETBALL; and Maya Angelou’s DOWN IN THE DELTA. Her television work includes ABC’s Desperate Housewives and HBO’s True Blood. Woodard co-starred in Lifetime’s hit remake of Steel Magnolias, (SAG and Emmy nominations), for which she won an NAACP Image Award.

Recent films include Best Picture 12 YEARS A SLAVE, directed by Steve McQueen; Marvel’s CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR; New Line’s ANNABELLE; and the Netflix Original JUANITA. On the small screen, she most recently starred in Marvel’s Luke Cage and the Apple series See. Woodard can currently be heard in Jon Favreau’s THE LION KING, and she currently stars in CLEMENCY.

In addition to her acting career, Woodard is a longtime activist. She is the co-founder of Artists for a New South Africa, and served on President Barack Obams’s President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. She is an active advocate for the arts in education, working to narrow the achievement gap and increase student engagement through the arts.

Please check out CLEMENCY, now streaming on demand, or any of her other extraordinary work from the past four decades.


Please enjoy the film and the conversation, and join us next Friday for another Friday Flashback movie + conversation. Consider making a donation to HamptonsFilm, which will allow us to continue to curate this series of live recorded talks.