A gamble, and a gambit, beginning to pay off
Chess series co-star Moses Ingram was unrelenting in her journey to Hollywood
In 2012, Moses Ingram, then a freshman at Baltimore City Community College, sat down with a student adviser and shared her goal: She wanted to act.
The adviser picked out a thick book of professions, plunked it in front of her and told her to “pick something,” Ingram said.
As she stormed away, Ingram considered dropping out. But before she left the building, she walked into another adviser's office. Ingram steeled herself for another brush-off. But Nana Gyesie had a different message: He was there to nurture.
“He never minimized my dreams. He dreamt with me. About everything my dreams could be. And then he brought it down to layman's terms and was like, `Let's come up with a plan to get you where you want to be.' And that's what we did,” Ingram said.
That fall day exemplified the ups and downs of a journey that took Ingram from her West Baltimore neighbourhood to the role of Jolene, the best friend to the lead character in the Netflix miniseries The Queen's Gambit.
Ingram, now 27, said the acting bug began when her mother, along with a teacher at Windsor Hills Elementary, enrolled her in an after-school theatre program as a way to keep her out of trouble as a high-energy 10-year-old.
She never lost interest. After high school there were years of part-time jobs, countless auditions, rejections and local theatre gigs in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. She eventually made it into the master's drama program at Yale.
Success in The Queen's Gambit quickly led to other roles. She landed a part in the Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand film The Tragedy of Macbeth, slated to be released this fall. And she is working on the Michael Bay-directed thriller Ambulance with Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II.
Anya Taylor-Joy, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for best actress for The Queen's Gambit, said Ingram brought an unparalleled maturity to her role. The women played best friends who met as children in an orphanage.
“I was incredibly impressed with this being her first job out of university, but I think that also gives her something,” Taylor-Joy said. “Moses is a real person. I was thinking about myself when I first started working. I was just a kid and Moses is a woman, truly, and I think that gives her a confidence and a gravitas that you can feel on screen. I just adore watching her.”
Full of pride, Gyesie saw much of Ingram in Jolene. “Mo is a Yaletrained actress. She's also a Baltimore City girl and she's going to let you know,” he said.
Ingram said she saw Jolene's character “as a full woman with a life and heart who grew up in a place where she was at the bottom of the totem pole and grew up and wanted to change that.”
She is now looking forward to more leading roles for Black actors. “Jolene is a supporting character,” Ingram said. “It's complicated, because we do need more stories where people who look like me aren't just supporting. But this was not that story. I just hope that we continue to lean into writing more stories for people that look like me.”