And it’s not all one story.”īerry remembered seeing “Roots” for the first time as a child, “And one of the things I remember most is how affected I was by seeing, for one, so many black people on television. And that we should teach our children the truth, that blacks had something to do with the way this coutry was built, that Native Americans had something to do with it. I thought, what am I doing here? What good is going to come from portraying this slave that has an affair with a white man? And I’m slowly beginning to see that there was some good in showing that our culture is woven together, that we can’t keep separating American history. “I think we’ve been so denied the truth that when I saw if for real, it just - it hurt,’ she said. Visibly moved and upset, Guy, who plays Queen’s mother, Easter, recalled the experience in passionate detail. I didn’t know they were tourist attractions until I got to Charleston. “That wasn’t something my parents did on summer vacations. “I had never been on a plantation before,” said the actress, referring to the Charleston, S.C., location where the film was shot.

Like Berry, Guy said working on the movie was often painful. “I was re-enacting a part of history and I felt … like it was a responsibility that had been given to me to bring light in a dark place - something Alex used to always say.” And that was horrifying.”īerry said she held fast to the fact that Haley’s story was a true story. “Had I been born 100 years ago, this could have been my story. “I wanted `Queen’ more than anything so far in my career,” said the 24-year-old Berry. The $18 million production goes a long way toward making that point, despite some melodramatic drawbacks.Īnd it’s a story that still resonates a century after the fact, particularly for Berry and Guy, who have interracial backgrounds. Was deeply concerned that a lot of the light-skinned people were rejected by the darker-skinned people among the slave hierarchy and that they had no really defined place.” There were thousands upon thousands of children of the plantation - as they were called - they were children of mixed parentage, and nobody had really ever spoken on their behalf. “He saw Queen as representative of a vast body of dispossessed people.

Queen by Alex Haley