Everyone Looks Great On the Cover of Essence

It’s hard to maintain such a feverish pitch of excitement for A Wrinkle In Time for so long, but here is another boost in the form of a perfect magazine cover for Essence.

Ava DuVernay, Oprah Winfrey, and Storm Reid were interviewed for the February issue, and I’m basically as jazzed as I was when this movie was announced: Very. So is Oprah, who called it the Wizard of Oz for “another generation.” Hopefully, this film will skip past the critically-panned phase of Dorothy’s journey and jump instantly into being an iconic cinema classic.

As a director, Ava DuVernay made history when she was given a $100 million budget for A Wrinkle In Time, the first time in history a woman of color was chosen to helm a film of that size. It seems like she’s kinda sick of talking about it, though:

“When I’m introduced as the first this, first that… it sounds like Charlie Brown’s mom to me,” DuVernay said about the magnitude of the project. “It doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s not anything I earned. I don’t allow myself to take it in like it’s real. I’m trying to have all of us up in there and more. I don’t want to be someplace by myself. I don’t want to be on a pedestal as the first this and that. That’s so wack; that is the old way of thinking.”

But it’s definitely not irrelevant that the film’s protagonist was cast as a young girl of color, nor that Oprah Winfrey and Mindy Kaling are powerful time-wrinkling goddesses:

“I so want Black women to love it and Black girls to love it. I want everybody to love it, but this is a love letter to us,” DuVernay said.

“This is me trying to make us in a way we haven’t been rendered in film before—as a firmly centered hero in a fantasy about other worlds and as the saviors of the whole universe. Looking at everything we think we’re not, and at the end of the movie we are all of everything.”

You can watch a behind-the-scenes interview here and check it out more in the February print edition.