Andra Day looks stunning as she covers InStyle June 2021 issue , which was photographed By Chrisean Rose and styled by Julia von Boehm for ‘Andra Day Enters a New Season’, . For the shoot hair was provided by Tony Medina along with makeup by Porsche Cooper.
The Oscar-nominated actor and singer Andra Day, who was born Cassandra Monique Batie, says that she was thinking about Billie Holiday earlier in her career when she chose her stage name. She manifested her stage name into wininng a Golden Globe award for her current movie ‘The United States vs. Billie Holiday’ . For the feature Andra Day sat down with Rebecca Carroll for the Instyle Magazine June 2021 issue .Carroll’ had interviewed Andra while doing press for the movie, an original Audible podcast ‘Billie Was a Black Woman’.
“I never had a Plan B,” Day tells Carroll. “Tunnel vision, always.” In 2010, fashion designer Kai Millard Morris was in the audience outside of a strip mall in Los Angeles where Day was performing. Morris is the former wife of Stevie Wonder Stevie connected Andra with a producer named Adrian Gurvitz who helped her music career flourished . Day was nominated for a Grammys for ‘Rise Up’, the anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2017.
Day has expressed moving on from the Holiday role as an “exorcism” or “a divorce”, Andra described the psychological and emotional experience of going to a different place, one where she returns to being Andra Day. “It’s a little scary,” Day admits. “Because you’re on a precipice a little bit, and you’re going, ‘OK, who am I? And who am I supposed to be? How am I supposed to be in this season?
Day says she has a wonderful life. “Listen, it’s so fun,” she says, delighted by the fairy-tale aspect of all that has happened to her around the movie. “And it’s even more fun now — there’s this element of, like, sensuousness. To me, that describes Billie better.”
Day, lost 40 pounds for the role, as Holiday and expresses her determination to live in Billie Holiday’s mind as a musician and performer. Day wanted to stay away from the objectification and hypersexualization of Billie Holiday in the male-dominated world of jazz music during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.
She explains “I didn’t want any element of sexualization. I had come out of something in my own life — dealing with porn addiction, sex addiction,” she says, like we’re just a couple girlfriends chatting about everyday weaves and woes. “I’m being very, very candid with you because I’m not the only one. But I knew I wanted all of that very much gone.
Andra Day on Her Weight Loss
Day addressed her 40 pound weight loss to play Billie Holiday.
“I’ve had people ask me, ‘Do you feel prettier now that you’ve lost weight?’ I was like, ‘Hell, no! I liked being juicy! I was cool,’ ” she says, laughing. “But I do like the way [the weight loss] feels on my body, I like the way it feels on my joints. You do notice a difference. Besides, to me, there is no such thing as a classic beauty. Beauty takes on so many different forms, in different times and depending on the nation. It’s just about being confident, loving yourself, and understanding your value.”
Andra Day interview. Read on at InStyle Magazine.
