It sounds like actress Danielle Brooks went through some difficulty while filming the latest musical adaptation of The Color Purple. Brooks recently explained that she needed to go to physical therapy and a chiropractor due to a specific scene that “really took a toll” on her body.

The disturbing scene she referred to, was the one in which her character “Sofia” is attacked, severely beaten and arrested by a group of men after refusing to be a maid for a racist white woman.

“I ended up having to do that scene over the course of two days for multiple hours a day, and it pulled my back out,” Brooks revealed to Indiewire. “Swinging back and forth trying to get the mob off of me. Of course, we have an incredible stage combat leader [stunt coordinator Mark Hicks] and his crew were fabulous, but doing it over and over, that really took me out, where I had to do physical therapy and go to the chiropractor for a few weeks to recover while still having to work.”

Danielle Brooks, who also played Sofia in the musical’s 2015 Broadway adaptation–she was nominated for a Tony Award for her stellar performance–added that the intense arrest scene is portrayed differently in the film versus the Broadway version.

“When we did the mob scene on Broadway, you don’t even see it. You just see me come down center stage and fall to my knees, and then you’ll see I lift my head up and now I’ve transformed into a new version; a downtrodden, spirit-stolen Sofia, which I can sustain for a year. But it’s much different doing [it for real], and having 10 to 15 guys surrounding you and you wanting to put everything in it because you want it to make sense from every angle, to not feel like you phoned it in,” she said. “I pride myself on being a physical actor. That’s where I live. I love finding how I can use all of my body for the character. I just want to use everything that I can.”

Brooks added that she has a regular routine after finishing filming her roles to “wipe off the character” she just played.

“The first thing I have to do is get out of my wig, get out of my clothes, and I take a hot towel to my face and wipe off the character. That seems to help. But when you talk about the internal, the spiritual part of giving of yourself, that takes time,” she said. “To me, a lot of it has to go back to the ancestors. I call it blood work because you have to go down your bloodline and talk to them, or at least I did, and pull from Black women in my family and Black women just in history that have experienced things like this. I think about those women, and it’s hard to shake those stories.”

Image Credit: Danielle Brooks | Instagram

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