As our conversations around Black femicide grow louder, so does the need to understand the irrationality behind these horrific acts; a psychology that feels almost impossible to comprehend. That’s part of what makes Sterling K. Brown’s latest role in Is God Is feel especially timely.
In the film, the Paradise star portrays the Monster, a deeply disturbed man who commits unspeakable violence against his wife and children. When asked what could drive someone to such brutality, Brown didn’t excuse the behavior. “He’s a sociopath,” Brown said bluntly.
But to play a role so far from his own loving relationship with his wife of 20 years, Ryan Michelle Bathe, he had to unpack the thinking behind it.
“I do feel like there is this thing that many Black men feel with regards to, ‘How come I don’t get a chance to be a man within my home?’ And you can put that in quotation marks,” Brown theorized, aligning it to a deep frustration tied to masculinity, power, and societal expectations.
He continued by pointing to the long historical shadow that enslavement and systemic racism have cast on Black family structures.
“America’s a patriarchal society, but I think our culture, because of slavery, because of the disenfranchisement of the Black family, has been forced into a matriarchy,” Brown explained. “And I feel there is a frustration that many Black men feel of ‘How come my house doesn’t run the same way that a white man’s house does?’”
Brown’s comments are not a defense of violence, but rather an attempt to examine the toxic mix of patriarchy, entitlement, generational trauma, and distorted ideas of masculinity that can fuel abuse.
“I’m taking this to the end degree because it doesn’t justify the burning of human beings,” he stressed. “But I do feel like there’s an interesting sort of tug-of-war between men and women in our community that we’re still trying to figure out how to meld and work together in harmony rather than against each other.”
And the monster was easy to let go as soon as Brown returned home from filming. “You ask most of from theater and whatnot; once the play is over, the play is over, and you go back to doing whatever it is that you do with your regular life,” he shared. “Plus, because I’m not a sociopath, it’s not hard for me to stay in that character. It’s let’s shake that s%$ off so you can move on to the next thing.”
In this film, where enacted vengeance for the Monster’s crimes is in itself brutal, Brown pointed out, “the movie functions more as myth than it does as something that is directly sort of linear. It’s not supposed to be real, even,” But he understands why women, sick of the cycle of violence, readily take matters into their own hands.
“It’s pointing to the level of agency that Black women can take in terms of how they want their lives to be governed. There is a forward momentum.
And I don’t think that forward momentum means going out and killing people. That’s like the end degree of something. But it doesn’t mean that you have to sit back and take something either.”
And for that to happen, someone has to be the face of evil. “I’m a fan of Black women being front and center in the narrative of this film. And sometimes you have to be the bad guy in a story that you think is worth being told.”
Is God Is opens in theaters on May 15.