Danielle Brooks And Walter Thompson-Hernández Find Grace, Healing And Hope In ‘If I Go Will They Miss Me’

For Danielle Brooks, the opportunity to star in If I Go Will They Miss Me was an opportunity to step into something quieter. Known for commanding performances that let her larger-than-life personality shine through, Brooks was drawn to a role that required her to communicate as much through what remained unsaid as through dialogue. “And so I was excited to do that,” Brooks says. She was equally drawn to writer-director Walter Thompson-Hernández, whose passion for the project became clear during their first meeting at the London Hotel. “We sat down at the London Hotel for hours and just chopped it up,” Brooks recalls. “And his passion for the project, I knew that I was going to be in good hands.”

That conversation also revealed something Brooks considers essential to the filmmaking process: collaboration. “I knew through conversation that he was a collaborator,” she says. “I feel like the best stuff that you get is from directors who are willing to hear from their actors and not just treat us like puppets.”

That collaborative spirit is at the center of If I Go Will They Miss Me, Thompson-Hernández’s feature-length expansion of his award-winning 2022 Sundance short, which recently screened at the lauded festival as well as the Martha’s Vineyard African-American Film Festival. The film stars Brooks as Lozita, J. Alphonse Nicholson as Big Ant and newcomer Bodhi Dell as 12-year-old Lil Ant, a boy struggling to connect with his distant father. At the same time, mysterious visions begin appearing around his Watts neighborhood.

The result is a deeply intimate father-son story that uses magical realism, Greek mythology and the rhythms of a South Los Angeles neighborhood to explore family, generational trauma, incarceration, forgiveness and the possibility of healing.

For Thompson-Hernández, those themes are rooted in something much more personal: the communities and people he knows.

Brooks approached Lozita not simply as a character, but as a woman whose life deserved honor. Thompson-Hernández told her that Lozita was inspired by someone close to him who had died from cancer. Brooks initially looked forward to meeting her, only to learn that she was no longer alive. “So then I was like, okay, this is about honoring her,” Brooks says.

That realization expanded the role beyond one woman. “This is about all of the Lozitas whose voices are muted,” she says. “How can we uplift them and let them be seen and shine light on them?” Thompson-Hernández gave Brooks photographs of the woman who inspired the character, and Brooks studied them closely.

She paid attention to her hair, tattoos, clothing, and even the way she held her mouth. She studied images of her braiding her daughter’s hair, looking for the small details that could make Losita feel like a complete person rather than a character constructed solely from a screenplay.

“It was really the pictures, the photos that captured me,” Brooks says. “It was looking at her hair. It was looking at her tattoos... It was just the details of her braiding her daughter’s hair and just how she held her mouth.”

For Brooks, that kind of research is part of the joy of acting. “That’s fun,” she says. “I live for exploration in that way.” Thompson-Hernández also gave his actors room to improvise, allowing the performances to develop organically. For Brooks, working alongside Nicholson and Dell created an environment where the process began to feel almost effortless.

“After dissecting the script and having such a great scene partner in Jay Fons and in Bodhi, it felt easy,” she says. “It was a good experience for me.”

The authenticity of If I Go Will They Miss Me extends beyond its performances. The film was shot in Watts, and the production itself became immersed in the neighborhood. It was far removed from the polished, insulated environment of a traditional Hollywood set. “We didn’t have one trailer,” Brooks says. “We didn’t have crafty. We had a cooler for our drinks.” She laughs as she describes the atmosphere as essentially “backyard type.”

But that simplicity helped the filmmakers capture something that cannot always be manufactured: the unpredictability and intimacy of community life. At one point, production had to stop because a neighbor who worked from home refused to turn off her music during her lunch break.

“She was like, ‘I’m on my lunch break. This is my playlist, and this is what I eat,’” Thompson-Hernández recalls. No amount of negotiation would change her mind. “And she would not change,” he says. Instead of fighting against the interruption, Thompson-Hernández recognized it as part of the world they were trying to portray.

For him, the production was about bringing professional actors together with people from the community who were already part of his life. “They are real friends of mine and family in this movie,” he says. “It just felt really special to be able to merge all these worlds.”

That approach helps explain why the Watts depicted in the film feels lived-in rather than simply used as a location.

One of the film's most distinctive elements is its blending of Greek mythology with the realities of life in South Los Angeles. Lil Ant uses mythology to make sense of the adults around him. His imagination becomes a tool for processing complicated relationships that may be too difficult to understand directly.

For Thompson-Hernández, that idea grew out of his own childhood. “There’s already so much mythology that exists in this community,” he says.

As a child, Thompson-Hernández and his friends created imaginary characters they called “airplane boys,” inspired by the planes flying overhead. That childhood mythology became part of the film's foundation. At the same time, Thompson-Hernández remembered encountering Greek mythology in school and realizing that the stories could help him understand the complicated people in his own life.

“When I first learned about it, I was like, man, this is so beautiful and interesting because it doesn’t only teach me about Greece, but it also teaches me about the people in my life who are just as complicated as Odysseus,” he says.

Lil Ant makes those connections himself. “Medusa is Mom. Poseidon is Dad,” Thompson-Hernández explains. The filmmaker sees that as evidence of the emotional intelligence children possess but adults sometimes underestimate. “He’s making these beautiful connections that I think we don’t give young people enough credit for,” Thompson-Hernández says. “He’s like, ‘This person reminds me of Dad and Mom.’”

For Thompson-Hernández, mythology becomes a language through which Lil Ant can understand the people he loves. “It felt relevant,” he says. “And it felt like a way to understand complicated people in our life.”

If mythology gives Lil Ant a way to understand his family, grace gives the film its emotional center. “Grace is my favorite word in the English language,” Thompson-Hernández says. “It’s such a beautiful word that I don’t think we say enough of.”

The film asks what it means to love people who may have hurt us, particularly when those people themselves may lack the tools to show up in healthy or meaningful ways. At the center of that question is Lil Ant, a 12-year-old boy who can still see light in complicated people. “This film is about grace,” Thompson-Hernández says. “This film is about a young 12-year-old boy who’s so emotionally mature and complex, and still so youthful, and has so much light in him.”

For the filmmaker, Lil Ant's journey becomes a lesson in forgiveness without requiring the audience to ignore pain.

“He’s able to teach us what it means to forgive,” Thompson-Hernández says. “Both forgive and remember.” That distinction matters. The film does not suggest that healing requires pretending harm never happened. Instead, it asks whether compassion and redemption can coexist with the memory of what happened. “Even the most complicated people in our lives, who maybe hurt us in different ways, all deserve a level of grace,” Thompson-Hernández says. “A level of compassion and redemption.”

Brooks sees the film's commitment to complexity as one of its most important contributions. She believes Hollywood has too often approached Black communities through extremes: either images of extraordinary wealth and success or narratives centered exclusively on hardship.

“We do have complexity,” Brooks says. “That’s what I want to make sure that we make the focal point.” If I Go Will They Miss Me allows its characters to exist in that complicated middle ground. There is a father who has been incarcerated. A mother is navigating whether to stay with a man she loves. A child is trying to understand his parents while simultaneously constructing an imaginative world of his own.

For Brooks, those contradictions are not something to smooth over for the sake of a more comfortable narrative. “We’re just so complicated,” she says. She believes that is precisely what makes these stories necessary. “To get to tell this story about a dad who was incarcerated, about a mom who’s really dealing with, ‘Do I stay with this man that I love?’” Brooks says. “This is necessary.”

Thompson-Hernández’s authenticity is what drew her to the project. “The way in which Walter has presented this to us as an audience, us as a world, is very much authentic, very much real, very much honest,” she says. “So I will forever back stories like that.”

For Thompson-Hernández, the film's ultimate message is hope. He points to a line from Leonard Cohen's “Anthem” about light finding its way through a crack as a guiding philosophy.

“No matter how dark it gets, there’s always hope,” he says. “There’s always light.” That belief shapes Lil Ant's emotional journey: he's been hurt by his father but hasn't completely abandoned hope for him. Thompson-Hernández doesn't want to reveal the film's ending, but he points to the way Lil Ant continues to see his father through the mythology of his imagination.

“This boy, who his father has harmed, ultimately still feels hopeful about his father,” he says. Something profoundly childlike and profoundly human lives in that decision. Lil Ant can acknowledge his father's failures while still seeing something larger in him. “He still sees his dad as a Greek god,” Thompson-Hernández says.

That contradiction is the heart of If I Go Will They Miss Me: the possibility that people can be wounded and still love; that families can be fractured and still seek connection; and that communities facing difficult realities can still contain imagination, beauty and possibility.

For Brooks, the film's message is ultimately about healing. For Thompson-Hernández, it is grace. And for both, it reminds us that even in the darkest circumstances, there can still be a reason to believe something beautiful is possible.

If I Go Will They Miss Me has a limited theatrical release in Los Angeles on September 11, 2026, followed by a wide theatrical rollout across 30-plus markets nationwide on September 18, 2026.