FKA Twigs’ Josephine Baker Audition Brings Director To Tears

FKA twigs made Maïmouna Doucouré forget she was watching an audition, not Josephine Baker herself. The director says that performance reduced her to tears during the search for her film’s leading actress.

Doucouré described that turning point in Variety’s new report from the set. She needed someone who could carry demanding dramatic scenes alongside the singing and dancing.

“I literally started crying because suddenly I was seeing Josephine Baker. I completely forgot that I had written the scene,” Doucouré said.

The movie centers on Baker’s 1951 return to America and the segregation awaiting her there. Flashbacks connect that chapter to her childhood, Paris breakthrough and wartime resistance work.

Baker’s life gives the production far more to work with than her stage performances. Born in St. Louis, she worked her way through theater and New York’s Harlem Renaissance before finding an audience in Paris.

Her celebrity later provided cover for dangerous work against the Nazis. While entertaining people connected to the enemy, she gathered information for French military officials and concealed intelligence in musical scores using invisible ink.

The fight against racism continued after the war, when Baker challenged venues that separated their audiences by race. Her refusal to accept those arrangements pressured club owners to admit integrated crowds.

Baker’s story has already drawn another major recording artist toward the screen. AllHipHop reported in 2022 that Janelle Monáe was attached to a separate Baker series, with A24 and Monáe’s Wondaland involved.

That announced television project focused on Baker’s espionage during World War II. Her screen career broke barriers too, as the first Black woman to lead a major motion picture in 1927’s Siren of the Tropics.

Baker later spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. She was among the few women given the opportunity to address the gathering.

Doucouré’s production includes Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Baker’s mother and draws on collaboration with Baker’s family in this Studiocanal-backed feature. Twigs has learned French for the part, which also requires her to portray Baker across different ages.

Filming in France and Bulgaria is scheduled to continue through November 13.