“Getting together with the family in this movie definitely has its bumps and bruises, because the family has a [peculiar] dynamic, particularly when a matriarch passes,” Williams tells rolling out about the film. “It’s about deciding who’s going to take over that tradition, and who will be in charge. And so, you know, these mommas are very, very clear that they are the queens in their own home.”
Williams first rocketed to national fame playing the ruthless, gun-toting crime family enforcer Keisha in the classic film New Jack City. The mother of two then cemented her icon status via the record-breaking cable series “Soul Food,” for which she won an NAACP Image Award, and enhanced her legacy starring in the seminal Candyman horror films.
Williams said she is made for Christmas movies because this is her favorite holiday. And the movie, “Welcome to the Christmas Family Reunion,” pulls from the realism of Black family life and holiday gatherings where the joys of fellowship are also interspersed with interfamilial strife, rivalries and occasional embitterment.
“We experience those things terms of the whole matriarch passing, and it becomes, ‘who’s gonna pass the baton?’ ” Williams told rolling out. “And I feel like we come to the conclusion that the baton doesn’t get passed, that we all share it, because nobody can replace the matriarch of the house.”
