Shirley a sure bet
Actress Regina King knows how to choose roles that are right for her
On some mornings, Regina King opens her eyes to a set of questions: Can I do this? Why am I doing this? Am I taking care of myself ?
The answers come as a choice: Stay in or go out there. But with a movie to promote (Netflix’s Shirley) and more projects on her slate, King knows full well the decision she has to make. But that doesn’t make it any easier.
“It’s a lot to wrap your mind and your emotions around,” said the actress, director and producer, who worked for more than a decade to bring the story of the glass-shattering politician Shirley Chisholm to the screen, even after her own personal tragedy two years ago.
“There are times when I find myself kind of falling into autopilot, but I think that space is self-preservation. My body and my mind are like, ‘OK girl, check out a little bit.’ And luckily I’ve been doing this for so long that muscle is still there and I’m able to activate it involuntarily.”
What King has been doing for so long is entertaining us. First as the quintessential teen Brenda on the 1980s sitcom 227, then as a quintessential around-theway girl in John Singleton’s classic ’90s triptych: Boyz n the Hood, Poetic Justice and Higher Learning.
For years after, King was known as a supporting actress with big main-character energy. But she couldn’t be pigeonholed.
In 2019, she earned an Oscar for her role as a mother on a mission in If Beale Street Could Talk. The next year, she directed her first film, One Night in Miami.
To cap off 2020, she won an Emmy for her starring role as Sister Night in HBO’S dystopian superhero series Watchmen.
But this year it’s different out there.
Since the death of King’s son, the musician and DJ Ian Alexander Jr., in 2022, King has stayed in. Filming for Shirley had begun just weeks before his passing. Production eventually wrapped after a hiatus.
Then she went on one herself. Now, two years later, King has gradually re-entered Hollywood’s whirlpool while making sure to not get sucked under. When she appeared during the 2024 awards season, it was both strategic and sentimental: She was there for filmmaker Ava Duvernay, Oscar winner Angela Bassett and Oscar nominee Danielle Brooks.
“One, I show up for art,” King said. “Two, I show up for art that moves me. Three, I show up for my friends, because they show up for me. Four, because I was just starting to come back into it, they all felt like spaces that I could control.”
When I sat down with King before a screening of Shirley at the National Museum of African-american History and Culture, her old press-junket muscles were just warming up. She’d presented at the Oscars just a few days earlier. That same week, she’d be off to New York for an exclusive sit-down with Good Morning America anchor Robin Roberts, one of her first appearances talking about Ian.
Going with your gut is a career choice for King, whose divergent roles fall into an almost divine order. The same goes for Shirley, a film King spent 15 years trying to get made, about the first Black congresswoman’s Hail Mary run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. It’s a public-private story that almost eerily mirrors where King is at in this moment.
“In telling her story, it was (important) to show how awesome and unique of a politician she was, a strategist, but to show the humanity,” King said.
“To show that she’s a woman, that she has these emotions and all of the things that come along with just being a spiritual being having a human experience.”
Historian Zinga A. Fraser, a consultant on Shirley, said the film provides a framework for Chisholm’s empathy: “Black political women and Chisholm explicitly have never been framed with being soft and compassionate. You can be fierce and bold and radical and at times angry, but also soft-spoken and quiet and thoughtful and strategic,” Fraser said.
“The film allows audiences to get a 360-degree view of a Black woman in the 1970s operating in a harsh world.”
King’s portrayal of Chisholm is tight and fiery. The congresswoman is compact with passion, packing righteous indignation in perfectly coiffed hair and a matching skirt suit. She is laser-focused but loving. Demanding but never loud. There’s little of her private life in the film, which zeros in on her 1972 presidential bid. Yet the relationship between Chisholm and her sister Muriel is intimately rendered.