A few weeks ago, actor Danielle Brooks shared a video on social media of her daughter Freeya sitting in a movie theater waiting to watch The Little Mermaid. Then, a trailer for the upcoming The Color Purple came on, and Freeya’s face lit up as she saw her own mother on the big screen, playing Sofia in the iconic story.

“She was just filled with joy, and it filled my heart immediately, brought tears to my eyes, and I just got so emotional,” Brooks tells Little Gold Men (listen to the interview below). “Because at the end of the day, you want to leave your child with something to be proud of.”

Four-year-old Freeya, who almost made a brief appearance in the movie (“Her time to shoot was right in the middle of her nap time, and it did not go well,” says Brooks with a laugh), doesn’t yet know how much The Color Purple, based on Alice Walker’s acclaimed 1982 novel, has changed Brooks’s life. It’s surely a story that Brooks, most well known for her breakout role on Orange Is the New Black, will tell her daughter someday.

Brooks, who was raised in South Carolina, was 15 when she won an internship from Bravo that invited a handful of teens and their parents to New York to learn about the entertainment business. There was some downtime, so her father took her to see The Color Purple on Broadway. “I was mind-blown to see people that looked like me in a professional setting, because people who grow up in small towns like myself…there was no one that was doing this,” says Brooks. “I was so taken aback to see that there were possibilities for this theater thing that I loved, and I just became obsessed with the story.”

After studying at Juilliard and then getting her big break on Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, Brooks made her Broadway debut in a 2015 revival of The Color Purple, playing the brash, fearless Sofia. Now she’s reprised the role for the hotly anticipated new movie adaptation, which hits theaters on Christmas Day. In it, Brooks brings Sofia to life for a new generation, costarring with Fantasia Barrino and Taraji P. Henson in the epic telling of a group of Black women facing and overcoming adversity in the South in the early 1900s. Says Brooks, “To get to do that again for somebody that will now be that 15-year-old girl from that small town, to get for them to see me now, to help to fulfill their dream by seeing me in this position—that’s a big deal.”

For the Broadway production of The Color Purple, Brooks was nominated for a Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical, and the cast won a Grammy for best musical theater album. And yet Brooks says that getting to play Sofia in the film by director Blitz Bazawule was “not an easy road, by any means.” She first had a meeting with Bazawule, and then was asked to put herself on tape, performing Sofia’s iconic song “Hell No!”

“There’s this part of you, the ego comes up, and you’re like, ‘I won a Grammy with y’all doing this. Why are y’all making me sing? My voice hasn’t changed,’” she says. “But I kept telling myself, ‘Do not get in the way of your blessing.’”

So she put herself on tape, and then, after hearing about another actor who’d done the same thing for a different project, she wrote a letter to Bazawule, expressing how much she cared about the character. “And even if I wasn’t the person for his movie, I wish it and pray it the best,” she says.

Months later, she got a call that they wanted to do a chemistry read with the actor who’d be playing Harpo, Sofia’s husband. It happened to be Corey Hawkins—one of Brooks’s good friends from Juilliard. “I don’t know how much they know about our relationship, but when they told me to do a chemistry read with my best friend, I was like, ‘Man, this is about to be, like, warm butter on bread,’” says Brooks.

Soon after, Brooks got a surprise call from Oprah Winfrey, who—along with being a producer on the new film—had played the part of Sofia in the 1985 version of the film that went on to be nominated for 11 Academy Awards. She broke the news that Brooks had landed the part; Brooks later posted the video online of her finding out. “My heart was so full because this industry is so tricky to navigate, and it’ll mess you up sometimes and make you feel that you have to be a diva,” she says. “I’ve seen people succeed off this negative energy, but that’s not my spirit. And so to go through this six, seven month journey of trying to get this part with humility…I’m just grateful that it worked out the way that it did. It just taught me you can handle things with humility and with grace.”

When it came to playing the role of Sofia, an outspoken, strong-willed character who rejects the systemic limitations put on a Black woman in the 1930s, Brooks says it was different in many ways from how it had been for her onstage. She, for one, has changed. “I am a mother now. I am a wife now,” she says. “I actually know what that looks like now, to have a commitment to a partner, and what it is to give birth and to be scared of dying, giving birth. There’s all these layers that I didn’t have before.”

Oprah herself also wound up presenting a surprising challenge. While Brooks says Winfrey was extremely supportive, and she felt comfortable seeking her out for advice when she needed it, she sometimes also had to ignore the icon in the room. “I kind of had to find a way to block her out. It’s really hard, she has such an energy and a presence,” says Brooks, who remembers trying to read Viola Davis’s book Finding Me on set to distract herself from Winfrey’s presence. “But she was really gracious, to give me the space to bring my own Sofia to the screen.”

Overall, playing Sofia in the big screen version—a colorful, joy-filled take on the classic story—allowed Brooks to fly in a different way from when she was onstage. She credits Bazawule for letting all the actors put their own spin on these characters for a modern audience. “He just said, ‘You know what? I handpicked you for a reason, so I’m going to give you permission to bring all of your ideas into the room,’” Brooks recalls. For example, when Brooks was performing “Hell No!” she got the idea that she wanted Sofia to kick in a door, and so the crew made that possible.

And the kicking in of doors is still on her mind, as Brooks starts garnering awards buzz for her vivacious performance. “I’m just getting started,” she tells Vanity Fair. “What’s important to me is making sure that people that relate to me are seen. And especially for the dark-skinned, plus-size girls, I really want Hollywood to expand how they view us and see us because we’re so complex. There’s so much that we are, what we can do and what we’re capable of. And so I just want to keep pushing that, pushing that.”