Rosario Dawson Tears Up at ‘DMZ’ Premiere at SXSW: “I’m Reeling”
Rosario Dawson choked up on the panel while promoting her new limited HBO Max series DMZ, a post-apocalyptic story of a mother searching for her son inside a ruinous future Manhattan that’s become a gang-filled wasteland following a second American Civil War.
Having just watched the final cut of the premiere episode for the first time at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, on Sunday, the actress said the story stirred up feelings about her past, family, poverty and the issue of toxic masculinity tackled by the series.
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“I’m reeling,” Dawson said of the pilot, which was directed by Ava DuVernay. “I grew up on the Lower East Side in the ’80s and ’90s and it was war-torn. I grew up in an abandoned building. I knew what it was like where poor people helped poor people and never expected anyone else to come and rescue you. There was so much danger and there was so much beauty. There’s a balance you strike every day trying to navigate your humanity, trying to balance your fears and your hopes. You’re growing up in communities and raising your family in communities that are at war — you can go into communities across America that are experiencing poverty and violence and trying to keep your family safe and making sure [your kids] are going to be more afraid of you than the drug dealer on the street to keep them in line … [The episode] just touched a deep core in me that felt so real.
“And maybe with Rent I got to express a bit of this, but it was never so palatable and real and as visceral as this,” she added, wiping away tears. “I’m so emotional right now. This is so real for so many people in the world around us … some of this is going to be triggering with a lot of the footage we’re seeing in the news [of the war in Ukraine]. But there’s a real heart and a lesson that is there that might be surprising for people to encounter in a fictional work.”
The screening was scheduled almost two years to the day after the pilot wrapped in March, 2020. While the show was originally conceived as series, DMZ was scaled back to four episodes amid the pandemic. The other panelists included showrunner Roberto Patino and co-stars Benjamin Bratt, Freddy Miyares and Hoon Lee.
“We didn’t come back to [filming DMZ] for another year and a half,” Dawson said. “So we had a lot of time to deliberate on the story and these characters. The pivots in the story come quite quickly because all that space was crunched into these four episodes. And so every single beat is intense. Sometimes you can watch a show and there are those filler episodes. There’s no filler moments in this entire thing.”
On a lighter note, Dawson joked about how she now has a foot in so many of the popular cinematic universes — she played Claire Temple/Night Nurse in Daredevil (as well as on the other former Netflix Marvel shows), she’s Ahsoka Tano on The Mandalorian (and her character is getting her own spinoff), and now there’s DMZ, which was based on a DC graphic novel.
“I’m just trying to be in all the universes — ‘live long and prosper,’ anybody?” she said, referring to the Star Trek expression. “That’s the last universe. Just that last one.”
DMZ premieres March 17 on HBO Max.
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