Tyler Perry and Donna Biscoe team up again in ‘The Six Triple Eight’ on Netflix

Atlanta actor Donna Biscoe was pleasantly surprised when Tyler Perry himself invited her to star in his new Netflix film about a little-known slice of Black history.

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Auditioning is a non-negotiable part of most actors’ lives, and one that has kept Atlanta-based Donna Biscoe busy throughout much of her long career. Every film and TV job has required a tryout, so being asked to be part of a project without one — by one of the most noted figures in the industry — for the first time in her career came as an unexpected treat. Tyler Perry himself asked Biscoe to appear in his new film The Six Triple Eight.    

Made two years ago, largely at Tyler Perry Studios, the film is based on Kevin M. Hymel’s 2019 WWII History magazine article, “Fighting a Two-Front War,” detailing the activity of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, an all-Black and all-female battalion. Tasked to deal with a three-year mail backlog, the team managed to sort more than 17 million items of mail — well ahead of schedule. 

After a brief theatrical run, The Six Triple Eight debuts on Netflix December 20, starring Kerry Washington and Ebony Obsidian, with appearances by Susan Sarandon as Eleanor Roosevelt, Sam Waterson as Franklin Roosevelt and Oprah Winfrey as Mary McLeod Bethune.  Biscoe plays Emma Derriecott, the mother of Lena, Obsidian’s character.

According to Biscoe, during World War II, no other all-female Black battalions were around. “[It was felt]  that they did not have the intellectual capacity to do anything of importance,” she says. “They were trying to do things but kept hitting a roadblock. The only way they ended up taking this job was Eleanor Roosevelt stepped in and sent them to Europe.”

The performer was not familiar with the story and feels “99% of Americans don’t know about it, even African Americans.” Once she was hired, she began her own research. “It’s a wonderful story, but it’s par for the course with the educational system not teaching Black history — not thinking it is important enough. I would dare to say there are a million stories out there that have not been told about our people in our community.” 

Biscoe has acted for Perry before, on both the film Daddy’s Little Girls and the series All the Queen’s Men. While she relishes the experience, she realizes she has to be on her toes. “Working with him, you have to go in knowing how he works. You can’t go on Tyler’s set and not know what you are doing. He comes in knowing exactly what he wants to do. He doesn’t waste a lot of time, and, trust me, I have been on many sets, just sitting around.”

In this particular movie, she did notice he wasn’t shooting as fast. “He was giving his actors an opportunity to play with a scene and take their time,” Biscoe says. “He wanted to get this right. I have a great admiration for any creative person who has been able to find his niche and audience and build on what they want to see and be able to get rich doing it. He found his audience, writes for them and gives them what they want.” 

A casting agent “discovered” Biscoe, who was born at Fort Benning, while she was employed as a flight attendant for Eastern Airlines and invited her to be in an industrial piece he was casting. Nothing ever became of that, however, so she took it upon herself to get her career going. Biscoe attended the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York for training. Soon after, she returned to Atlanta and started theater, where an early role was playing Martin Luther King Jr.’s mother in The Boy King at the Atlanta Children’s Theater.  From the 1980s on, she became a theater regular, appearing in productions such as Horizon Theatre’s Homebody/Kabul, True Colors’ Our Town and the Alliance Theatre’s Doubt, which was her first job at the company and required her to go to some dark places internally.

Her first TV gig was In The Heat of the Night, and she started film work in the ’90s. Some of her more prominent roles overall have been as Taraji P. Henson’s mother in the Oscar-nominated Hidden Figures, the Oprah Winfrey Network series’ Greenleaf and Ambitions and the villain Lady Leona Byrd in Bounce TV’s Saints & Sinners, a plum role where she played a murderer.  

Biscoe, 69, considers herself lucky to be able to book enough projects to sustain herself as a character actor. Doing so takes time, not just to audition but to be on location when needed, often at the drop of a hat. While Atlanta is her home, that doesn’t mean she hasn’t had to spend occasional time in Los Angeles as part of the business. Being so active in TV and film, however, means that she had to largely let theater go. 

That changed last year when she returned to the stage for Horizon’s The House That Will Not Stand. She had not been on stage in roughly 10 years when director Thomas W. Jones II called her and sent her a script. “Theater is a grind, and all of that came flooding back, but it was fun getting into the daily rehearsals,” she says. She also loved the challenge of it all and digging her teeth into a new character. 

After she finished Saints & Sinners in 2022, she started to worry. “What’s next? I’m of a certain age; I’m never going to work again,” she told herself. Soon after, she started a production company, Sir Hayden Entertainment Services, named after a grandchild, which she says is dedicated to celebrating and empowering women of color over 50. She’s finished her first project there and will be doing more behind-the-scenes work, including production.

While Biscoe doesn’t have any future gigs lined up, she’s relishing the fact that 2024 has proven to be her most visible year yet. Besides Six Triple Eight, she’s appeared in The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat (teaming back up with her Mississippi Damned director Tina Mabry); Freedom Hair; two Lifetime movies (Tempted By Love: A Terry McMillan Presentation and the new A Very Merry Beauty Salon; plus the TV series Reasonable Doubt. 

Many of those were filmed a while ago but are just now seeing air. “That’s how the business is,” she says — and she’s not complaining at all. 

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