Tonya Williams, the Canadian actor and founder of Reelworld, which she grew from a film festival into a phenomenon, recently unearthed a document from 1987. That’s the year she moved to Los Angeles after stints on the children’s show Polka Dot Door and the CTV sitcom Check It Out!. The document is a list of colleagues she met at auditions and get-togethers.
Two things make this a Tonya Williams story. First, the names on that list! Lisa Bonet, already on The Cosby Show. Patrick Breen, the character actor (Galaxy Quest). Todd Field, the actor (Eyes Wide Shut) and director (Tár). And second, merely making these contacts wasn’t enough for Williams – she helped form them into a theatre group. Every Sunday they’d meet in someone’s apartment to perform plays.
“Classes were expensive, so we created our own,” she says. She also organized a group of actors to convince casting directors to hire Black people for roles that weren’t written as Black.
Now 65, Williams will receive the Changemaker Award at next week’s Canadian Screen Awards for her work with Reelworld, which she launched in 2000 as a festival to showcase the work of racially diverse filmmakers, then expanded into a host of professional development initiatives, including the Reelworld Training Lab for producers and writers; the Reelworld Hollywood Connector; the Reelworld Black Entrepreneurs Program; and Access Reelworld, Canada’s largest database for racially diverse talent. But as honoured as she is to receive the Changemaker, for Williams it’s akin to winning the Breather Award for breathing. Making change is her default setting.
“If you’re born Black, you’re automatically an activist,” she says. “It’s a given that I’m a changemaker – I’m just doing survival.”
We meet at her Toronto home (she lives mostly in L.A.), a pleasingly unmodern Victorian decorated with colourful landscapes painted by her mother. Williams is leaving tonight for Cannes, to lead a Reelworld schmooze campaign, and she hasn’t packed yet. She’s an unapologetic introvert – when people say, “It’s your birthday, I’m going to take you to lunch,” she thinks, “A real treat would be a gift card so I can order in by myself.” But today’s assignment is Talk, so Williams talks, for nearly two hours.
Growing up in Jamaica and England, she consumed art with intensity, watching films and playing albums on repeat. At the age of 7, when a waiter in an upscale London restaurant told her they didn’t serve ham sandwiches, Williams calmly asked him to bring her ham and bread. “I wasn’t being sassy,” she says now. “I just thought, ‘How can you not know how to make a ham sandwich?’” At 11, when her family immigrated to Canada via ship, she helped herself to the lobster buffet; only years later did she learn she’d crashed First Class.
“I took a lesson from that,” Williams says. “Let someone stop you. Don’t stop yourself. If the sign says, ‘No women allowed,’ well, note to self: Let’s get women in there.”
In Oshawa, Ont., Williams’s schoolmates were primarily white. Her mother, a registered nurse and midwife, and her father, a lawyer and judge (who’d transferred to McGill from Tennessee after city bus riders berated him for not sitting in the back), would often tell her, “What your friends can do, you can’t do,” Williams recalls. “We knew it was unfair. But we also knew that unfair isn’t the reason not to move forward. Unfair means, I need to learn the rules, then navigate around them to get where I need to go.”
In high school, she acted in plays and commercials; when she moved to Toronto to study at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan), her mother bought the house we’re sitting in. Williams served as landlady, collecting rent, paying bills, filing taxes. “That was my mother’s idea of how to train a child.”
Two breaks launched her career: She won Miss Black Ontario, sponsored by her hair salon, Azan’s, then landed a national commercial for milk that put her milk-mustached face on billboards. “The Black and South Asian communities, who were seeing no images of themselves, wanted their daughters to meet me,” she says. “It confirmed the idea my parents raised me with: What you do affects your entire Black community.”
In L.A., however, most of her auditions were for street junkies or illiterate single mothers. She’d go, but she’d speak in her everyday voice. “I didn’t want those roles,” Williams says. “I wanted to play women who didn’t perpetuate dehumanizing stereotypes. I stubbornly thought if I kept auditioning my way, I might open someone’s mind to how else Black people can be.”
It worked. After auditioning to play runaway teen Drucilla Winters on the soap opera The Young and the Restless, she got a callback – to play Drucilla’s sister Olivia, a doctor. She stayed for 19 seasons.
William Bell, the Y&R producer who also created Another World and The Bold and the Beautiful, “had no intention of creating Olivia until he saw me,” Williams says. “But he could see change coming, and soap operas were the perfect venue because you’re in people’s homes every day.” Her fan mail went from, “Get off my show,” to “Please come to our city.” Williams advocated for more diverse hires behind the scenes, too.
Reelworld “began with me trying to get other festivals to be more inclusive when they didn’t want to be,” Williams says. “TIFF had the Planet Africa platform, but that was for Black people from everywhere except Canada. I kept thinking about when, as a little kid, I asked my dad why there wasn’t a Black Barbie. He said, ‘Because the world is waiting for you to build the factory.’ I didn’t want to start Reelworld – I had to.”
After 24 years, Williams is ready to stop rising at 5 a.m. L.A. time and working well past 5 p.m. Toronto time; her latest plan is a two-year ebb away from Reelworld. But she’ll continue advocating for change – the right kind. “I understand that if you’re in your 20s now, change is not happening fast enough,” she says. “But lasting change takes time. I’d rather take baby steps forward than big, performative steps, promoting people of colour before they’ve built relationships and can call in favours, which sets them up to fail.”
Personally, Williams provides the kind of opportunities that often go unseen: She’ll leave a key under the mat at her L.A. home if someone needs to crash on her couch. (Clement Virgo, Damon D’Oliveira and Gloria Reuben have been there.) Her e-mail and cell aren’t secret. She’ll call an agent to boost an aspiring writer.
Just do not – repeat, do not – come to her to complain. “If you hear yourself blaming someone or something, that is not the conversation to have with me,” she says, citing a first-time playwright who called her in tears because the theatre company changed her text, and she wasn’t sure she could write again.
“If you are broken by that, this is not the industry for you,” Williams says. “You worked on this for five years? You should have made 10 other things at the same time. They want to make this man a woman, or this woman a chair? Go right ahead. Welcome to Monday in our business!”
Williams knows she can be impatient. She’s your boss, not your mom. She cultivates associates, not friends. She chose to not have a spouse or children, to keep her time her own. She says what she thinks. But for Reelworld, she feels big emotions: pride, hope, love. “When I leave,” she says, “I want the whole industry to take it under its wing, to realize it’s their responsibility to keep it going, because it brings value to everyone.
“Bill Bell didn’t hire me on Y&R because it was a ‘good’ thing to do,” she sums up. “Creating a Black family brought a bigger audience. There’s an underserved audience out there, and Canada can serve it. It’s in your best interest. You’re not helping diverse people. We’re helping you.”
Special to The Globe and Mail
