Sterling K. Brown on fatherhood and Waves

Black Panther and This Is Us star Sterling K. Brown talks about fatherhood, his new movie Waves and working with director Trey Edward Shults.

This Is Us and Black Panther star Sterling K. Brown admits to experiencing cabin fever “from time to time” during the pandemic lockdown, but it doesn’t seem to dampen his spirits.

Sitting in front of white plantation shutters set against a dark-coloured wall, Brown’s charisma oozes through the screen of the Zoom chat, here to talk about Waves, a propulsive, emotionally poignant family drama out in cinemas this week.

It’s a three-way conference, and Waves writer and director Trey Edward Shults is also on the line. But there are some special guests too.

First, Brown’s nine-year-old son with his wife, actor Ryan Michelle Bathe, pops in to ask for permission to buy the Captain America character on Fortnite.

“Whoever came up with that game is a genius!” Brown says, laughing.

Later on, his four-year-old son will drop in, sitting on dad’s lap while holding the controller to a new remote-control jet toy.

The special appearances from his kids seem very apt for this chat about Waves, in which Brown plays the father, Ronald, to two teenagers whose experiences make up the first and second half of the film.

Ronald’s fatherhood is central to understanding Waves’ lead characters – Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and Emily (Taylor Russell) – and it’s also central to Brown’s life.

Brown is a multi-award winner for roles in The People Vs O.J. Simpson and This Is Us (Photo by John Sciulli/Getty Images for Turner Image)

“Fatherhood has been something that’s been on my heart since I was a teenager,” Brown says. “I always knew I wanted to be a dad. I had a very strong relationship with my father who passed away when I was 10, but he filled me up with so much love.

“I still carry that around with me today, and I looked forward to pouring it into other people.

“So there was something really interesting to me about Waves when I read it. I recognised who I could be and who I wanted to be as a father in terms of the two halves of the film.”

Waves is a story of two halves. The first centres on Tyler, a star wrestler for his school whose father pushes him to be the best. That encouragement from Ronald doesn’t come in the form of nurturing, but intense pressure.

The family in Waves – the Williamses – is an African-American family of means. They live in a spacious mansion and Tyler and Emily don’t want for anything. On the mezzanine level overlooking the cavernous foyer, there’s a home gym and Ronald pushes Trey hard in their training sessions.

It’s a scene that almost played out again at Brown’s home.

Brown plays ‘tough love’ father Ronald in Waves

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“There’s been a couple of moments during this quarantine where I’ve been sort of struggling with my oldest,” he explains. “We’re really trying to find ways to get him outside and active.

“So I’ll try to work out every day and at one point in time, he was working out with me and I kind of caught myself falling into a bit of Ronald. And he goes, ‘Dad, this isn’t fun, this isn’t fun for me’. And I said, ‘OK, you don’t have to do’.

“There was a part of me that wanted to teach the lesson that we finish what we start, but then there’s the part of me that says the circumstances are so different to anything we’ve ever dealt with and he’s a young boy being stuck in the house all day, without his friends.

“He loves his dad but he doesn’t want to just hang out with him the whole time!”

It’s unsurprising Waves has had a resonance for Brown in his personal life, given the film’s personal origins.

Or, as Shults puts it, “super, super personal”.

Shults, who at 31 years old and with three features under him might conjure the label “wunderkind”, had been tinkering with Waves in his mind for more than a decade.

But it wasn’t until he worked with Harrison Jr on his previous film, It Comes At Night, that everything kicked into gear.

Brown and Shults with stars Kelvin Harrison Jr and Taylor Russell (Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images)

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Shults pitched the idea to Harrison Jr and gave him the option of two characters in the story, Tyler or Emily’s boyfriend, Luke.

Harrison Jr was attracted to Tyler and told Shults that. Originally, Waves was conceived with a white family as the focus, drawn partly from Shults’ own life, but when Harrison Jr signed on to play Tyler, that had to shift.

Shults and Harrison Jr collaborated on the script in what the director calls “mini therapy sessions”, over phone calls and texts.

“We found a lot of commonalities in the sense of both growing up in the South – for him it was New Orleans, for me it was Texas – and similar relationships with our fathers, with lovers, with family, and the pressures we felt at that age – for me it was wrestling, for him it was music,” Shults says.

“We kind of moulded Tyler together and then I started writing. It was a beautiful experience, because I live and die by collaborators and collaboration.

“But I hadn’t really done that before in the writing space, because I get so pretentious – ‘I’ve got to exorcise my demons and write this alone!’ – but doing that a little more with someone was a beautiful thing.”

Collaboration and the ability to listen and take things on was key to making Waves work, as a story about a black family crafted by a white filmmaker.

In a cultural context in which there is increasing conversation about authorship and who gets to tell whose story, Waves is, according to Brown, “one that kind of breaks the rules”.

Brown was impressed by Shults’ collaboration with star Kelvin Harrison Jr

“When there’s attention to cultural specificity from a director who is outside of the race, but who cares enough to say ‘we can’t just plug black people in and do this generically, we have to do this specifically’,” Brown says. “When there’s that kind of attention, the collaboration works.

“If there isn’t that kind of attention to detail and consideration, it could be bad.

“Thankfully, Trey isn’t that dude and he didn’t want to make something general, he wanted to make something specific. He said to Kelvin, ‘What do we do to make this story specific to your African American experience?’”

And that specificity is born out of Shults and Harrison Jr’s memories of their fathers.

“It started with us talking about our dads and the relationship and the way we felt with our dads at that age, and how we’re thinking about our dads now,” Shults says.

Waves may be the story of Tyler and Emily, but their father’s influence, and the change in Ronald brought on by the cataclysmic event in the middle of the film, looms large.

“If I had just read the first half of this movie, which I thought was an amazing, propulsive experience, I don’t think I would’ve done the role,” Brown says.

“The second half of the film is where you see Ronald learn from his mistakes and recognise there is greater strength in vulnerability than there is just being hard.”

Waves is in cinemas from Thursday, July 9

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