The Woman King is the product of a thousand battles Davis, 57, and Prince-Bythewood, 53, have waged over the course of their careers, on subjects ranging from budgets to hairstyles. Despite being the only African American actor to achieve the triple crown of acting — an Oscar (for Fences), an Emmy (for How to Get Away With Murder) and not one but two Tonys (Fences and King Hedley II) — Davis had not had the opportunity to play a physical, heroic role like this one. The Woman King is a $50 million action-adventure epic — think Braveheart with Davis in the Mel Gibson role — a movie that somehow felt both inevitable and impossible for her and Prince-Bythewood to get to the screen. Its cast includes South African actress Thuso Mbedu, English actress Lashana Lynch and Ugandan British actress Sheila Atim as warriors in the army, and English actor John Boyega as the Dahomey king.

“The part of the movie that we love is also the part of the movie that is terrifying to Hollywood, which is, it’s different, it’s new,” Davis says. “We don’t always want different or new, unless you have a big star attached, a big male star. We didn’t have that going on for The Woman King. [Hollywood studios] like it when women are pretty and blond or close to pretty and blond. All of these women are dark. And they’re beating the shit out of men. So there you go.”

The process of making The Woman King coincided with and contributed to an era of personal reinvention for the actress. “I’m in a period of redefining myself for myself,” Davis says. “My Blackness, my womanhood, my nose, my lips. I reject everything anyone ever said about me. And I didn’t know that I had the power to do that.”

Davis, who both stars as the army’s general, Nanisca, and produces, was familiar with the Dahomey Amazons, as the Agojie are known, but was pulled into the movie via an unconventional pitch. In 2015, Bello traveled to the West African nation of Benin, formerly the Dahomey kingdom, and learned the story of the Agojie there. Bello came home to L.A. convinced there was a film in that history, and enlisted producer Cathy Schulman, then head of the organization Women in Film, to help her realize it. “We wondered if it was possible to make an all-Black female action movie, which is really what we wanted to do,” Schulman says. This was before Marvel’s Black Panther, which fictionalizes the Agojie as the female warriors of the Dora Milaje, broke box office barriers in 2018, and before the Black Lives Matter movement sparked a new urgency in Hollywood’s sometimes halting efforts at inclusion. In 2015, Bello used a moment when she was presenting Davis with an award at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles to tell the audience the story of the Agojie general and suggest that she’d like to see Davis play the role. “Instead of just presenting the award the way you normally would, she pitched the script, just this whole story,” Davis says. “And then when she finished it, everybody started cheering.” Davis was in.

Schulman, who had produced best picture winner Crash in 2004, first tried to get The Woman King set up at STX, where she was the head of production. “Everybody looked at me like I was insane to even think this could be a commercial movie,” Schulman says. “I remember them saying, ‘You’d need a lot of money to do that, with the battles, but it’s the kind of movie you should make for $5 million.’ ” Schulman left STX in 2016 to return to producing, and she, Bello, Davis, and Davis’ husband and producing partner at JuVee Productions, Julius Tennon, pitched the film around town. Studios didn’t see the film as likely to earn enough to warrant the budget it required, or they wanted to cast light-skinned, well-known actresses, which felt historically inaccurate to the producers and likely to take the audience out of the movie, Davis says. “We talked to a lot of people and got rejected. We were trying to reason with them. What is it that is standing in the way of you saying yes and accepting this movie and giving us a proper budget?”

In the summer of 2017, at Sony’s TriStar label, Davis and her fellow producers met with the studio’s then-chief, Hannah Minghella, and Minghella’s then-senior vp, Nicole Brown. Within two years, Minghella would depart for a job at Bad Robot and Brown would ascend into the studio’s top role, making her the first Black woman to run a live-action label at a major film studio. When Brown became the head of the company, she made The Woman King one of TriStar’s top priorities, and the film secured a co-financier, eOne. At the time of that first meeting, the film didn’t have a script or a director, but, Brown says, “I could see the movie. I was so mesmerized by the thought that these women existed in the world and I hadn’t heard of it. It had all the makings of a huge theatrical story, epic emotions, and incredible thrills and hero moments. And it had landscapes that I just wanted to see. And it had never been told.”

In between that first meeting and the studio’s green light in 2020, Marvel released Black Panther, which would go on to gross $1.3 billion worldwide and be nominated for best picture, disproving one of the more pernicious pieces of Hollywood conventional wisdom, that movies with Black casts don’t travel. “When I heard that movie was happening, I got a little nervous,” Brown says of Black Panther. “Like, ‘Oh no, did we not move fast enough?’ And then when I saw it, it only emboldened me more to make sure we made this movie. There’s absolutely room for both stories. That’s a comic book, fantasy experience, and this is inspired by real life. This is real people and a real part of our history.” At one point, Lupita Nyong’o was attached to The Woman King, in a version of the role ultimately played by Mbedu, which Brown says evolved to be younger in rewrites — Nyong’o would go on to play a key role in Black Panther as a former Dora Milaje member. Now The Woman King will land in theaters just two months before the anticipated Black Panther sequel, Wakanda Forever, arrives, and the films have a relationship that Prince-Bythewood considers complementary. “I love the fact that we are in a time when we both exist, it’s a beautiful thing,” she says. “Their success absolutely had a hand in us finally getting a green light. They changed culture.”

Since it is derived from real history, the Woman King story is more complex than a simple hero’s tale — and the accuracy of the film has been a subject of speculation even before its first public screening. In mid-August, The 1619 Project author Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted, “It will be interesting to see how a movie that seems to glorify the all-female military unit of the Dahomey deals with the fact that this kingdom derived its wealth from capturing Africans for the trans-Atlantic slave trade.” The film does tackle that subject — Davis’ Nanisca objects to her king’s practice of selling war prisoners into slavery, and advocates for a different policy. “When I came aboard, those were some of the first conversations,” Prince-Bythewood says, of the depiction of the slave trade. “But it was, ‘We’re going to tell the truth. We’re not going to shy away from anything.’ But also we’re telling a part of the story which is about overcoming and fighting for what’s right. And I think we got it right.”

Prince-Bythewood joined the film in 2020 on the heels of directing The Old Guard, an action movie starring Charlize Theron and KiKi Layne that was bigger in both budget ($70 million) and audience than any she had made before. According to Netflix, 72 million homes streamed The Old Guard during its first four weeks on the platform, placing the film sixth among Netflix’s 10 most popular movies up until that point, ahead of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (64 million) and the Ben Affleck action movie Triple Frontier (63 million). “I have always wanted to be in the big sandbox,” Prince-Bythewood says of making larger films. “Once you’re in there, you tend to stay there in this industry.”

Years before their meeting on The Woman King, Davis and Prince-Bythewood had met at a dinner for the director’s 2008 drama The Secret Life of Bees, an evening that did not lead to an immediate connection. “Everyone thinks I’m hostile, which sometimes I convey,” Davis says. “But with Gina, I told Julius, I was like, ‘That director from Love & Basketball, she don’t like me. I’m talking to her. She’s not saying nothing.’ ” Prince-Bythewood says she was awed by Davis that night, and felt shy. When they met again for The Woman King, however, Davis felt a spark. “Finding a director was a slog,” Davis says. “There are a lot of directors out there that the studio approves, but they have a lot of things going on. They don’t need to direct The Woman King. Or [there are] people who would be interested in it but are too afraid of it. And then in walks Gina. It’s like when I met my husband, adopted my daughter — there are just perfect moments in life.”

In her meetings with the studio, Prince-Bythewood referenced epic films like Braveheart, Gladiator and The Last of the Mohicans and talked about her love of athleticism. Her background in sports, including boxing, was among the key qualities she brought to the job, giving her a perspective on the realism of fight scenes, both technically and emotionally. “What was normal to me growing up was women who went after it, who were aggressive, who had that mentality of wanting to be the best,” Prince-Bythewood says. “To outwork everybody, to leave everything out on the floor. Those lessons were normal to me. And then, as I got older, it was fascinating when I started to learn how few women had that. I truly believe that everyone has this innate athlete, innate warrior within them. I’ve been in a ring, I’ve gotten hit in the face, I’ve hit back. To be able to bring those kinds of nuances to scenes — what does that feel like before you’re about to fight? How you stand, how you think? Just knowing those types of things, I think, was very helpful.”

In assembling a crew for the five-month, South Africa-based shoot, Prince-Bythewood prioritized department heads who were women and people of color, including cinematographer Polly Morgan, production designer Akin McKenzie, costume designer Gersha Phillips, visual effects supervisor Sara Bennett and editor Terilyn Shropshire, ACE. For makeup, she hired a local, South African artist, Babalwa Mtshiselwa. “The thing is for women and people of color, often the résumés are not long because it’s about lack of opportunity, not lack of talent,” Prince-Bythewood says. “So when you’re in my position, it’s important to look past that résumé. There were a couple of people who’ve never done a film of this size before, but what they brought into that meeting, I knew that they were going to bring something extra.” Hair was going to be important on the film, and Prince-Bythewood wanted her actresses, many of whom had had the experience of being on sets where stylists don’t know how to do their hair, to have a say. The director asked hairstylist Louisa Anthony for looks that were cool and functional in fight scenes, braids and short styles that her cast could move in. Prince-Bythewood’s mandate to DP Morgan was, she says, “I want our women to look more beautiful than they’ve ever been shot before.”

The director also had strong ideas about how certain character scenes ought to be shot — for a sequence in which a character is remembering a sexual assault, the director asked the actress to read the Roxane Gay book Hunger, a memoir about Gay’s rape. In thinking about how to shoot the scene, she referenced Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony at Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination hearing. “Where does my lens go?” Prince-Bythewood says. “It’s shot from her perspective. What would she remember hearing, seeing, smelling and feeling?”