The 'Sweat' ensemble player opens up about her 2017 Tony nomination and how the election of Donald Trump changed audiences' reaction to the story.
"I just thought, I'm a nobody. I did not
expect to be nominated,” Michelle Wilson tells ET.
The actress -- up for Best Performance by an Actress in a
Featured Role in a Play for her role in Sweat -- never thought
her name would be read aloud when the roster of 2017 nominees was announced the
morning of May 2. “It was a total and complete surprise, but it was awesome,”
the actress exclaims. "I woke up at 8 and quickly fell back asleep,
thinking I will press snooze.”
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The first person she called after getting multiple text
messages with the news was her Sweat co-star Johanna Day,
who’s also nominated in the same category with her, along with Cynthia Nixon (The Little Foxes), Jayne Houdyshell (A Doll’s House Part 2)
and Condola Rashad (A Doll’s House Part 2). "Being nominated with
Johanna Day feels like, 'Oh they got it,'” Wilson says. “You couldn’t pull one
string apart without the other -- it's really gratifying. You couldn’t have one
performance without the other."
The whole company, Wilson explains, was “verklempt” when Sweat,
also nominated for Best Play, was recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize for
Drama. The play, by Lynn Nottage, centers on a Reading, Pennsylvania,
blue-collar population in pain and stripped of its dignity. Wilson plays
Cynthia, a middle-class factory worker forced to go against her friends in
order to come home at the end of the day with a paycheck. Feud star
Alison Wright plays a drunken friend who eventually turns against Cynthia.
"This is not a sexy population," Wilson explains.
"It's hard-working, grinding people [that] have been invisible. What
happens is you sit down and you fall in love. Then you care so much as to what
happens to each and every person up on that stage." It was the 2016
presidential election that changed the energy of the show’s audience, Wilson
says. “Before the election, people would say, ‘That’s a beautiful story --
that’s really too bad.’ The day after the election, our audience sat there
stunned. The response was, ‘Oh, this is what happened.’”
This is Wilson's second play on Broadway after performing in A
Raisin in the Sun with Denzel Washington in 2014. A mother to a
19-year-old, she grew up in Detroit and went to an all-girls Catholic high
school outside of the city. Wilson got into theater because her dad wanted her
to stay out of trouble. "My father said, ‘By the end of the week you have
to be in three clubs, you have too much time on your hands.' I heard that if
you did a play or musical you were rehearsing all the time, so you didn't have
to be in three clubs." She then studied political science at the
University of Michigan before moving to New York.
“When I got to New York, I was surrounded by my creative
community but there were times when I had to step away just to provide,” Wilson
says. Now, years later, the actress is getting ready to walk the Tony Awards
red carpet dressed by Anna Wintour on June 11 at Radio City Music Hall along
with Day, her fellow cast members and creative team. She considers Sweat an
ensemble piece, meaning it doesn’t have an individual star, but several actors
whose roles are of equal importance. Ever since seeing Dreamgirls,
Wilson's first Broadway experience, she's always admired the chorus. "I
was always attracted to the hard workers and the people who make the magic
happen."
Being a part of the ensemble of Sweat, she says,
is a true honor. "I'm so proud of this company. I'm proud to be a part of
what I think is going to go down as one of the great American plays."
