Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today has had a

distinguished acting career spanning some five decades. Al-Frey Woodard has done everything from

hit TV show, Desperate Housewives, to a starring role as Winnie Mandela in the biopic of

Nelson Mandela's life. She grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma,

during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, and for much of her long career, she has been an

activist and campaigner, speaking out against race discrimination in the movie business, and lending

her support to the Democratic Party.

Her latest film, Clemency, sees her starring as a prison warden overseeing executions on

death row. It is an intense troubling film which portrays a judicial system stacked against

black defendants and dehumanizing for all who play a role in it.

It was made last year, before the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota turned the Black Lives Matter movement into an international,

not just a national campaign for racial justice, but it's a movie which resonates deeply in this particular

American moment. And for Alphrey Woodard, it prompts a question. Have her art and her activism

merged into one? Well, she joins me on the line now from her home in California. Welcome to Hard Talk.

Thank you.

I'm happy to be with you.

Right now, in terms of your own professional career and in terms of the politics of the United States,

which matters more to you, your acting or your activism?

Well, I can't separate them.

I am a storyteller.

And storytellers have been telling the tales of the tribe

since we first stood up on two legs around the fire.

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