REGINA KING
Regina King is acting royalty and now she’s bringing all of her nuance and fierce intelligence to her directorial debut, One Night In Miami. She gets personal and political with Total Film…
The actor/director/Oscar winner talks future hopes, the political present and new historical drama One Night In Miami.
Growing up in California, Regina King wanted to be not an actor or a director but a dentist, and her smile is certainly radiant when she pops up on Zoom wearing a grey hoodie and a Van Halen cap. She has reason to grin for it is the day after the US election has been called, with Joe Biden’s victory ensuring that Donald Trump does not get a second term as president. King, naturally, is delighted – she’s a political person whose beliefs are reflected in many of her film choices over a 35-year career, from Boyz N The Hood to If Beale Street Could Talk. And also by her activism: in the weeks leading up to the election, she could be seen urging people to vote; in September, when her performance as crimefighter Angela Abar/Sister Night in HBO’s Watchmen saw her receive an Emmy, her fourth, for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie, she wore a Breonna Taylor t-shirt; and she has been a vocal supporter of the Time’s Up movement to equalise pay and conditions for women in Hollywood.
“It is a moment of exhaling,” she says of the Democrats winning the White House. “But I still feel like we’ve got so much to do. In the next 100 days, who are going to be those
Cabinet members? How are we going to not take our foot off the gas, and lobby to put people in that have all of America’s best interests [at heart]?” She allows herself another dazzling smile. “Yes, it’s a sigh of relief. I guess the most positive way to describe how I feel is that if Trump had won, the work that we need to do would have just been… almost impossible, you know? And at least now it feels like, ‘OK, we’ve got a shot to move this boulder uphill.’”
King did not place a Zoom call in to Total Film to specifically discuss American politics in the here and now, but it is impossible not to given the reason she did call is her directorial debut One Night In Miami, a historical drama, part truth, plenty fiction, set in the mid-’60s but echoing so much of what is happening today. The film is set on 25 February, 1964, directly after Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) has defeated Sonny Liston to become heavyweight champion of the world. To celebrate, Clay heads for the Hampton House Hotel in Overtown, Florida to meet up with Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir) in his suite, and these two icons are joined by two more in soul singer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) and American football star Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge).
This meeting between these four inspirational men on that particular night really happened. But the dialogues that pass between them are imagined, with Kemp Powers, here adapting his own 2013 play, using the fact that all of his protagonists were on the verge of life-altering transitions – Clay is about to join the Nation of Islam and change his name to Muhammad Ali; Malcolm X is planning to leave the NOI to become a Sunni Muslim; Brown is to quit football for acting; and Cooke will introduce a political dimension to his songwriting with ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ – to investigate the meaning of being a Black man in America.
And now here we are with King’s elegant, electric adaptation arriving in the wake of Blacks Lives Matter marches being met with tear gas and batons. No wonder King pushed to finish the film’s post-production during these testing Covid-19 times in order to get it out into the world as soon as possible.
“We would have liked it to come out before the election, but things didn’t work out that way,” she says. “But perhaps it will serve as a reminder to American citizens that we’re supposed to be in control of how America works for us, and hopefully a reminder for those in positions of power to recognise that America is at a reckoning. The conversations that these men are having in 1964 are conversations that they were having in 1950, in 1940, in 1970, ’80, ’90. And still having today. It’s unfortunate and sad, but it’s a fact.”
born in Los Angeles on January 15, 1971, Regina Rene King acted at school but never thought of pursuing it. Her mother was a teacher, her father an electrician, and she, as stated, desired to go into dentistry. It wasn’t until she was a student at the University of Southern California that she decided upon acting as a career, and dropped out to pursue it.
By then, King had been a regular on NBC sitcom 227, playing “Brenda, a shy girl who will one day come out of her shell”. But it was the chance to act in Boyz N The Hood – its director, John Singleton, also attended USC, though King did not know him and had to audition – that tempted her to make the leap. It was the correct decision: she again teamed with Singleton on Poetic Justice and Higher Learning, and also starred in Friday, Jerry Maguire, Enemy Of The State and Mighty
Joe Young in the ’90s, while noughties highlights included Ray, Miss Congeniality: Armed & Fabulous and Season 6 of 24.
It’s over the past decade, though, that King has finally been getting the recognition and roles she deserves, doing stellar TV work in Southland, Shameless, The Boondocks, The Leftovers, American Crime, Seven Seconds, The Big Bang Theory and Watchmen. Her role in Barry Jenkins’ pitch-perfect take on James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk, meanwhile, as Sharon Rivers, the mother of a young woman whose fiancé is falsely imprisoned for rape, won her an Oscar and a Golden Globe to go with her four Emmys. It is typical of her resolve that she said of the Oscar, “I should be able to use it as currency going forward.”
It is also noticeable that King’s work has been almost exclusively political in the last five years, which is not so much a conscious move on her part as a natural one. “As a woman who’s going to be 50 in a couple of months, and has lived in America all her life, and comes from very proud parents and a proud family, and is a mother…” She pauses to arrange her thoughts. “I guess I shouldn’t put it in a box and make it just because I’m a Black woman. Obviously that has a lot to do with it. But I should speak on it more from a human space. As we get older, we begin to care about things that are bigger than ourselves. We want to leave this place a little better. We want to see change within our lifetime. I just think a lot of it came as these roles came. I was in a place in my life, and continue to be in a place in my life, where I have more wisdom, and more experience, and I’ve travelled more, I’ve seen more, I’ve read more. I have a deeper understanding, and maybe more empathy.”
King brought all of the above and some kick-ass fighting moves to Watchmen, with the nine-part series serving as a supreme example of how to balance thrilling entertainment with hard-hitting, pertinent themes. Partly inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2014 article for The Atlantic, ‘The Case For Reparations’, which addressed the unacknowledged fall out from slavery, HBO’s award-winning drama served as both a remix of and a super-charged sequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ benchmark comic book. Like that 1986 publication, it deconstructed the superhero genre while reflecting contemporary anxieties – in this case, racism and police abuse, politics and power. Astonishingly, the series opened with a recreation of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, when white mobs, many of them deputised and given weapons by officials, attacked Black residents and businesses in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Between 150 and 300 were killed, with 800 more admitted to hospital for injuries.
“There are many Black Americans who had no idea about Tulsa, and that’s because it’s a piece of history that was revised, wiped away,” says King. “I found out about Tulsa in my twenties. It might even have been John Singleton who gave me a quick history lesson. So when I read the script… three pages in, you can imagine my brain just firing on all cylinders, and the hairs on my arms raising up, in a good way. I thought, ‘Alright, Damon [Lindelof, who also created The Leftovers], you better not eff it up’.”
Eff it up he most certainly did not, and it seems that Hollywood is likewise beginning to get it right, at last opening its doors to women and people of colour. There is still a long, long way to go, but does King think we are witnessing a real sea change? Is this different to the short-lived energy that fizzed in the early ’90s when Boyz N The Hood followed Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing?
“Yeah, there was a certain energy in the ’90s that felt like, as a young Black person, you were being seen,” King nods. “Do The Right Thing was just amazing. It was Brooklyn but it doesn’t matter what borough or hood you’re from – if you’re Black, if you’re a teenager, you understood that. When Boyz N The Hood came along, not to make it a West Coast/East Coast thing, it was just like: ‘This is us! Somebody is repping us!’ I feel like it was received the same way as Do The Right Thing was around the country, and in neighbourhoods overseas. I feel like there was this energy that was coming out of America but was connecting worldwide. I don’t know what happened. It did seem to kind of fade.”
She shakes her head, and then the dazzling smile is back. “I’ll tell you what makes [now] particularly special. I feel like we’re starting to be able to have the opportunity to tell our stories through our lens, but if you take If Beale Street Could Talk and you take One Night In Miami, or the film I’m doing right now, The Harder They Fall [a revenge-drama co-starring Idris Elba, Zazie Beetz, LaKeith Stanfield and Delroy Lindo]… there are some similar themes but we’re getting the opportunity to show we are not a monolith when it comes to creativity and expressing art. We are so different, and that’s what makes us so special, and that’s the reason we do influence culture. By ‘we’, I’m talking about how Black people and Black Americans influence culture. We’re so different, and I feel like we’re at the beginning of seeing it on a regular basis. That is the hope.”
ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI IS PLAYING IN SELECT UK CINEMAS ON 26 DECEMBER, AND LAUNCHES WORLDWIDE ON AMAZON PRIME VIDEO ON 15 JANUARY 2021.
‘AS WE GET OLDER, WE BEGIN TO CARE ABOUT THINGS THAT ARE BIGGER THAN OURSELVES… WE WANT TO SEE CHANGE IN OUR LIFETIME’