Regina King feels the Oscars buzz for One Night in Miami
Her Hollywood ascent has brought awards for acting in film and TV. Now, Regina King is drawing rave reviews and talk of an Oscar nomination for best director.
Listen carefully — hear that hum? That’s what Oscars buzz sounds like. Yes, it’s been a while. In these pandemic times the feature film pipeline, usually gushing over the holiday period, is more like a dribble, and the kind of dazzling performances and artful filmmaking that have fuelled awards talk have been few and far between. One notable recent exception, the Margot Robbie-produced Promising Young Woman, starring Carey Mulligan, has brought some recognition for director Emerald Fennell. But already, that movie has some serious competition — cue the buzz! — after Regina King’s first directorial foray, One Night in Miami, which premiered at Venice last year, was released to the public by Amazon Prime on Friday.
With a string of awards and accomplishments that put King pretty much top of the tree in Hollywood — a best supporting actress Oscar (2019 for Barry Jenkins; If Beale St Could Talk), a best actress Emmy (2020 for Watchmen), and a 20-year film career that began with the groundbreaking Boyz in the Hood — King might well have been taken aback to discover she was the first black female director to have had a film in the program.
“I did not know that until I was told,” King, 49, tells me over Zoom from Los Angeles. “What is interesting and exciting is that I’m going to know from here on out that in every Venice Film Festival we will see filmmakers who look like me.”
Even if One Night in Miami went away empty-handed from the Venice awards, the film was voted second in the Toronto Festival’s People’s Choice Awards, a famous arbiter for the Oscars. With critics in raptures over the film — it has a 98 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes as the time of printing — is she preparing for glory this awards season?
“I’m going to leave that one alone,” she answers with a chuckle. “I’m just going to say that it is very exciting to think this many people feel like our film is worthy of being in the conversation. And I’m going to see where the conversations land. I feel at the end of the day it’s all subjective, right? You have a group of people and not everyone feels the same way about a film.”
One Night in Miami, based on Kemp Powers’ play, is largely set in a hotel room. A fictionalised account of a real meeting that took place in February 1964, it follows three future legends and friends, political activist Malcolm X (Brit Kingsley Ben-Adir), singer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr, from Hamilton) and American football star Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) watching Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) defeat Sonny Liston to claim boxing’s heavyweight championship, then congregating for a celebration. The following day Clay announced he had joined Malcolm X’s Nation of Islam and would be known as Muhammad Ali.
Initially, King had wanted to make a historical romance and ultimately decided Powers’ play fitted the bill. “I don’t think you see that many love stories told from a black perspective and in many ways this for me is a love letter to the black man’s experience,” she says. “I feel like you are witnessing thoughts and emotions from luminaries who are incredibly charismatic leaders, yet they are more fragile than we imagined. I had the desire to humanise them and also to make this film as a bridge to the present through this humanisation.” In the film Malcolm X and Cooke argue about how to bring the black cause forward, with Cooke maintaining that he was doing it via his worldwide success. King says the conversations depicted are the conversations we are having now. Still, when they started filming they never envisaged the powderkeg moment that culminated with the Black Lives Matters protests.
“It feels like one of those things that was meant to be,” King said last year during press interviews in Venice. “Initially, with the pandemic, we felt we would push the film back, but a couple of months after the pandemic hit and George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Avery had been murdered, we realised this needs to come out now. I feel like fate always had this planned out this way. But maybe we’re lucky and we’re going to have the opportunity to be a piece of art out there that moves the needle in the conversation for real transformative change.”
In Venice she never could have envisioned the violence that followed the January 6 under-policed Trump rally, while riot police had been out in force for the BLM protests. “Here’s the thing. While it was very tragic to watch it [the black killings] play out, I still believe that there were a lot of people worldwide, and within our country, who hear our anger and our stories and see the videos.
“(After the Capitol riots) the world has seen the difference between how policing is, how the justice system works differently for black people and white people.
“It’s two different Americas.”
She even relates the policing issue to Watchmen, where she plays Angela, a detective, as well as her alter ego, kickboxing masked avenger Sister Night.
“It was so much fun doing that – and a lot of work,” she says, exhaling loudly. “But I think a big part of what made it particularly fantastic is Damon Lindelof’s extrapolation of the Watchman universe and putting a theme in there that really resonates with where we are as a culture today. In the original graphic novel it was the possibility of a nuclear war, then in this iteration it was policing along with race in our alternative history, using actual history as an introduction and looking at what policing is. In that alternative history, it’s pretty much a mirror to policing in our lives right now.”
Where does her steeliness come from? “Oh, wow, I guess it comes from my mother and my grandmother and I think, as for a lot of black people, knowing the experiences of your elders and what they survived. There’s a certain amount of strength you have to have, that you’re born with, because of what they endured for you to be here.”
King was born in Los Angeles, the eldest daughter of a special education teacher mother and an electrician father who divorced in 1979. She began her acting career in 1985 on the TV series 227, which lasted until 1990.
Did being a child actor make her more relaxed with the profession? “Perhaps. I think there’s something special that comes with that. I feel like being a mum at 25 I had the opportunity to grow and learn with my son, and being a child actor, I was able to grow as the industry changed. When I started the regard for TV and film was not equal. Film was more on a pedestal. As my career evolved I was able to witness the art form of storytelling evolve. You were having deeper storytelling on TV.”
King’s first movie was 1991’s Boyz n the Hood with John Singleton and she went on to make Poetic Justice and Higher Learning with the groundbreaking African American director. “It was John who helped me understand what a director does beyond the relationship with an actor,” she says. “I wanted to be able to use my art as my voice. I think that’s where my strength lies, when I responsibly honour and speak on the history of my people and the history that is being made now.”
In the past eight years King has directed for television including an episode of Animal Kingdom, a US series based on the Australian movie. “You know in the US we’re really good at taking projects that exist over the pond or on the other side of the world and doing our American version. So thank you!” she laughs.
Her other TV endeavours include directing episodes of This is US, Shameless and two episodes of Scandal, the latter for African-American behemoth Shonda Rhimes. Perhaps they should team up again? “Shonda’s a powerhouse! I still speak to her and I’m sure our paths will cross where we collaborate again. I actually went into directing television saying I’m going to work with Shonda and I attracted that and it happened.”
What did she learn from her? “It’s something I’ve received from a lot of powerhouse women who I’ve worked with. It’s just her ability to remain graceful while still being a boss,” she says, lowering her deep, authoritative voice.
A month ago King finished shooting her latest movie, Netflix’s western revenge thriller, The Harder They Fall, where she stars alongside Idris Elba.
“Idris is working now in Australia,” she notes referring to his leading role alongside Tilda Swinton in George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing, also for Netflix.
Elba, one of the strongest and most recognisable black acting talents in show business, could be something of a touchstone for the four male leads in King’s film. She says the talented quartet “are tremendous actors and I just cannot wait to see what happens for them ... I feel so grateful that I’ve gotten the opportunity to showcase all of their amazing talents”.
And speaking of awards, Ben-Adir and Odom Jr have emerged as major contenders too. As the year unfolds, here’s hoping that buzz grows louder.
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