Exclusive: 'Mockingbird's' Scout on what Gregory Peck would think of new Atticus Finch
By Dylan Stableford
Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman,” the long-awaited follow-up to her 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” hit bookshelves shortly after midnight on Tuesday. Mary Badham, the actress who played Scout in the Academy Award-winning 1962 film adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” said she was among those highly anticipating its release.
“I was excited,” Badham told Yahoo global news anchor Katie Couric on Tuesday. “I had always hoped there would be another book of some sort that she had written, because writers can’t just write one book, and she was extraordinary. So I was thrilled.”
In Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Atticus Finch, Scout’s father, is a beloved lawyer who represents black defendants in the fictional Alabama county of Maycomb.
But in “Go Set a Watchman,” a darker side of Finch is revealed as he attends a Ku Klux Klan meeting and questions the benefits of desegregation.
Badham, who was born Birmingham, Ala., and grew up in the South, said it would have been natural in the 1950s for someone like Finch to explore his own prejudices.
“There was a very fine line that you had to walk during those days,” Badham said. “I could see how it would be very upsetting because things were so different then — well, not so different now if you look at the news. Unfortunately we’re still dealing with these issues.”
But the 62-year-old hopes the book can shed some light on the changing racial attitudes of the Civil Rights movement.
“I feel like Miss Nelle [Lee] is a mirror for us to look in,” Badham said. “We have to look at that reflection and see what it is that we really need to focus on in order to better ourselves. Is this really the world we want to live in?”
Badham, who was just 10 when the movie was released, said the novel helped her deal with growing up in the racially torn South when she returned from filming.
“Living in Birmingham, I was the peg that didn’t fit anywhere,” Badham said. “I had been to California. … People of all races and religions were able to be together. To go back to Alabama, the social rules were still the same.”
Finch, who was played by Gregory Peck in the film version of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” was based on Lee’s father, A.C. Lee, an Alabama lawyer.
Badham says her own father was “very much” like the Atticus portrayed in both books.
“My father had to walk a very fine line,” she said. “The rules we lived under socially in Birmingham at that time, you could not — it didn’t matter what you believed in — you could not live that path that you wanted to. You had to conform. Anybody that didn’t conform, it would hurt their personal life, it would hurt their business life. … You were locked in. If you were white, you were expected to toe the line.”
Badham said, in hindsight, she could see the predicament her father was in.
“What we got at home wasn’t necessarily what he was able to carry out on the street,” she said.
Badham was asked how she thought Peck, who died in 2003, would have reacted to the Atticus in “Go Set a Watchman.”
“I think he would be understanding of the complexity of human beings,” she said. “He was so well-read and so knowledgeable about the human persona that he would be able to work through it.”
Badham will be appearing at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on Tuesday, June 14. For more information click here.
Watch the full interview:
