NEW YORK – Call it Da’Vine timing.
For the last decade, Da’Vine Joy Randolph has been the standout of everything she’s in, outshining A-list co-stars like Sandra Bullock (“The Lost City”), Eddie Murphy (“Dolemite Is My Name”) and Steve Martin (“Only Murders in the Building”). But she’s finally getting some much-deserved recognition for “The Holdovers,” winning two dozen critics’ prizes for best supporting actress, in addition to earning Golden Globe and Critics Choice Awards nominations. She’s now considered the early Oscar front-runner in the category.
It's a moment she's arrived at through hard work, patience and the realization that "God has a bigger plan."
“I’ve been the ‘breakthrough’ in almost every project I’ve done,” Randolph, 37, explains, sitting at a Midtown restaurant last month. “At first, I thought that was bad, like, ‘Dang, am I not that memorable?’ But I had to reframe that in my mind: If you’re fresh and new and being discovered in every project, that’s a win.”
She likens her journey to the board game Chutes and Ladders: “You can seemingly be going along and everything is great, and then you slide down. But if you keep playing, you can jump right back up. And that’s life, especially in this industry. It’s more about trusting that your path is your path.”
Set in 1970s New England, “The Holdovers” follows a prickly yet compassionate cook named Mary Lamb (Randolph), who’s forced to spend Christmas with a surly teacher (Paul Giamatti) and rebellious student (Dominic Sessa) at the boarding school where she works. Randolph calls it “our little imperfect-perfect holiday movie,” showing how broken souls can come together and help make each other better.
“It’s real and biting and sarcastic and rude, but holidays are triggering. They bring up a lot of suppressed emotions,” Randolph says. “I love that Mary is honest, and in her feelings, and not in any way trying to mute it. She’s just like, ‘This is where I’m at.’ ”
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For Mary, it's her first Christmas without her teenage son Curtis, who was drafted and killed in Vietnam. She was also widowed years earlier and struggles to bring herself to visit her sister, who is happily starting a family of her own. Mary nurses her grief with a perennial mug of whiskey and breaks down crying after one too many in the movie’s most heart-wrenching scene.
Alexander Payne, the film's director, first saw Randolph in "Dolemite" and thought of her for the role.
“I find that actors adept at comedy can do dramatic parts without being dreary in them,” Payne says. “I’m so happy that people are responding to Da’Vine and what she brought to this. She gets huge laughs and also makes you cry.”
Randolph is impressed with Payne’s ability to make “the ordinary so tantamount,” and help viewers “cozy up to potential harsh truths about themselves.” The experience of making the film was also “healing” for the Philadelphia native: Randolph lost multiple relatives while she was off getting her master's degree at the Yale School of Drama in New Haven, Connecticut, where she graduated in 2011.
“I wasn’t able to attend many of those funerals. I felt so horrible and guilty for that,” Randolph recalls. Her family wanted her to prioritize her studies, which “can put great pressure on you to be successful: ‘You haven’t been around, so this education better pay off.’ For a while, I’ve been so focused on wanting to be something that my family would be proud of − that somehow, me being gone would be worth it.
“This allowed me to deal with some of that. It made me realize I hadn’t properly grieved.”
Before Yale, Randolph envisioned a totally different life path for herself. She got her undergrad at Temple University in Philly, where she studied classical vocal performance. "I never wanted to be an actor," she says. "I thought at this point, I'd be in Italy: penthouse, champagne, living the lavish life of an opera singer."
During her junior year, she was set to play the lead role in Temple's production of the opera "Aida." But when she sought out an acting coach to help with her performance, she was kicked out of the opera program.
"They thought I was secretly trying to become an actor," Randolph says. "I felt lost." Wanting to still graduate on time, she reluctantly switched her focus to musical theater, and eventually landed her first big break in Broadway's "Ghost the Musical," nabbing a Tony Award nomination in 2012.
Music is still an integral part of who Randolph is. She listened to jazz greats like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan to wind down while shooting "Holdovers." For years, she's kept a list of female musicians she'd like to play onscreen, one of whom was Mahalia Jackson. As if by manifestation, Randolph played the singer in last fall's civil rights drama "Rustin" ("It was like, 'Who read my diary?!'").
She is pursuing a biopic of another renowned singer, although prefers to keep details mum.
"It's me coming back to myself; reclaiming and reintroducing the fullness of me," Randolph says. "I feel like I'm just getting started. One of the beauties of 'The Holdovers' is that if nothing else – the accolades are wonderful ‒ but I hope this now allows me to hit a new ceiling of quality when it comes to projects. That's the dream."
