Six decades after she played Scout in the film version of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Mary Badham takes on the role of a neighbor in the play’s national tour.
Mary Badham describes herself as “just a retired old lady who likes to be in her garden and play with her grandkids.”
But in 1962 she was a child star, captivating the nation with her Oscar-nominated portrayal of Scout, the daughter of Atticus Finch, in the film version of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Now, six decades and many careers later, she is helping to dramatize the story once again, this time from a different vantage point. Badham, who has not previously worked as a stage actor, is now in rehearsals for a national tour of the “Mockingbird” Broadway production in which she will play Mrs. Dubose, Scout’s mean, and morphine-addicted, neighbor.
“I’m going full circle,” Badham said in an interview. “This is something I never contemplated.”
Badham, now 69, is still a little hazy on how this happened. She says she got a call out of the blue from the production, inviting her to audition. The play’s director, Bartlett Sher, said Badham’s name had come up during brainstorming for the tour, and that the casting team had tracked her down; he said as soon as he saw her do a workshop, he knew she could do it.
“She has not been on a stage, and that was a big adjustment for her, but she’s going to be great — she has a bright, blazing intelligence, and good listening and sharp delivery and all the things you need as a great actor,” Sher said. “And it was incredibly fascinating — I have never had an experience quite like it, to have this voice from the cultural history of the very work we were doing, and to see how we’ve changed and how she’s changed. It was beautiful to have her in the room.”
Badham has always been a bit of an accidental actor. She had no experience when a talent scout showed up in Birmingham, Ala., where she lived, looking for a Southern girl to star as Scout in the film adaptation of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1960 novel about a white Alabama lawyer — Finch — who agrees to represent a Black man accused of rape. Badham’s mother performed in local theater, and her brother (who became a film director) was in drama school; she aced a screen test, and before she knew it, she was off to California, performing alongside the actor Gregory Peck, who became an important mentor and friend.
“I had no idea what was going on — I was just out there playing,” she said. “I don’t even think we got complete scripts, because there were certain words and things that were deemed unseemly for children to hear. I did not have a clue what the film was about until we started going to premieres, and then all of us were in tears.”
In the decades since, Badham has worked selling cosmetics, became a certified nursing assistant, and even occasionally appeared on film and television. She never became a large animal veterinarian — her childhood aspiration — but, along with her husband and two children, she did make a Virginia farm her home. “I always wanted to live on a farm and have horses and animals, and we’ve had that through the years,” she said.
“I’m not an actor,” she added. “Acting is something that has just happened to me.”
She said she has a hard time watching the film “because all my friends are gone now — there’s only a few of us left.” But she usually says yes when given new “Mockingbird” opportunities; she has spent decades talking about the story at schools, universities and social clubs. “‘Mockingbird’ has been my life,” she said.
“It’s just weird, and I put it to the man upstairs — I just feel like he has something he wants me to say, and he picked me to say it and keep saying it,” she added. “My job has been basically to keep this story alive, and have people talk about it, so we can try to move forward with all of these problems that we still have.”
And what is the message of “Mockingbird”? “We should try to learn to love each other and be good people,” she said.
The show’s tour, led by Richard Thomas as Atticus and Melanie Moore as Scout, begins performances on March 27 in Buffalo and opens on April 5 in Boston, followed by runs around the country. This adaptation, written by Aaron Sorkin, opened on Broadway in 2018, had an enormously successful run before the pandemic and sold strongly again when Jeff Daniels returned to lead the cast as Atticus Finch. As Daniels departed and the Omicron variant surged, the show announced it was taking a nearly six-month hiatus, with a planned resumption in a smaller theater on June 1. A London production is scheduled to begin performances on Thursday.
Badham said she agonized over whether to play Mrs. Dubose, because the character uses racist language to describe Black people. “I had a real problem with accepting this role, because I have to use the N-word, and I have to be this horrible, bigoted, racist person,” she said. “I went to my African American friends, and said, ‘Do I want to walk around in the skin of this awful old lady?’ And they were like, ‘This is important. This is part of the story. You have to go out there and make her as mean as you can, and show what it was really like.’”
Badham also said she believes that the character of Mrs. Dubose, as a morphine addict, is important at a time when many Americans are struggling with opioid addictions. “That gives me another facet of the story to concentrate on,” she said.
After a few weeks of rehearsal, she said she is feeling more comfortable.
“It’s scary — I’ll tell you point blank, I’m mortally terrified every time I have to open my mouth, and I had no idea I was going to be onstage so much,” she said.
But, she said, she can feel the presence of others who have told the story before, and that strengthens her. “I feel like they’re with us, supporting us,” she said, “because they know this needs to be said.”
