- I do something different
for every single role that I play.
It's part of the preparation,
so the beauty of my life is that
I have been working for over 35 years
and it's still different.
[mellow jazz music]
I'm Regina King, and this is the timeline of my career.
Okay, wait a minute, Mom.
You said I was born a week late, right?
If you woulda have me on time, I'd be 16 already.
[audience laughing]
- Then you should have come out when I asked you to.
[audience laughing]
- I actually did the play "227."
It was a play before it was a TV series,
and Marla Gibbs sold it to NBC to make it into a series.
Nine auditions later, I finally got the part.
Marla Gibbs is the original boss.
Before it was a thing to be the actor, the producer,
the creator of something,
Marla Gibbs was doing it in the '80s.
I had the opportunity to soak in so much information,
so much bossladyness at a young age,
that I know for sure that knowledge,
that education has carried with me
all the way until my adult career.
- Girl, I seen him before.
He work at the Fox Hills mall.
- Mm.
Do he got a girlfriend?
- Yes.
- There is so much of a difference
between how your mind works doing a sitcom
and how your mind works doing a film,
and then enters John Singleton,
and I'm getting to see things for the first time
through someone else's first time.
Because of that,
I believe he just was so open to everyone around
being able to plug in to all of this knowledge
and all this whole world that he was exposing us to,
because we were all pretty, pretty green.
It was a singular experience because it was this moment
where you have all of these artists
that just want to be true to the story.
It was a special time.
- Dana. - What?
- Do me a favor.
- What, Craig?
- Hook me up with Debbie.
- She ain't got no time to be messing with you.
- Come on, Dana.
- On set, we just had a good time.
It didn't necessarily feel
like we were shooting a film.
In hindsight, yes,
it makes sense that it was such a success,
but in the moment it just felt like,
they really letting us do this?
Okay.
Let's do it.
- Don't nobody go in the bathroom for about 35, 45 minutes.
Somebody open the window.
- Having John Witherspoon play my father, that was huge,
'cause for us,
I mean, him and "Boomerang," and make earrings to it
like you supposed to do it.
Bam, bam, bam.
So, I just knew how brilliant this man was,
and this was Cube and my third film together,
so we already had a brother and sister chemistry.
It just was perfect to be sister and brother.
Plus Joy would kick your ass, anyway.
- Joy ain't gon' do a goddamn thing.
- Craig, get out my room!
- Shut up.
- So, I don't know that I went into it
feeling like this is going to be huge,
this is going to be cult classic,
but it did feel special.
Well, well, hi there, Winston.
- How do you do?
- As you can see, I'm even more beautiful and brilliant
than whatever her name is.
Get your butt out of that car.
- Okay.
- I think the thing that was just most exciting for me
was that I was going to get the opportunity
to work with Angela Bassett and actually work with her.
I think some people look at that as, oh,
you guys have done two films together.
I think if you talk to Angela and I,
we don't look at it that way,
because "Boyz n the Hood,"
we were in different scenes.
We didn't even see each other passing at work.
So, this was, for us in a lot of regard,
our first film together.
I love the fact that Kevin Sullivan
really embraced the rehearsal process.
Because the three of us were sisters,
he wanted to see how we may have reacted
in different stages in our life together.
It was a really great process
because I think what I've taken along with me
is the importance of backstory,
building a backstory to your character.
It may not be in the dialogue,
but it should show up in the performance.
It should make the character that you're watching
feel like a full character.
I really got a chance to exercise that
working with Kevin Sullivan.
Excuse me.
Everyone, I have a brief announcement to make.
Jesus was Black,
Ronald Reagan was the devil,
and the government is lying about 9/11.
Thank you for your time, and goodnight.
- No!
- I promise you to this day,
I could have the Will Smith,
50-kil deal, $500 million blockbuster,
and people are still gonna come up to me
to talk about Huey and Riley.
I went in to audition for Riley.
I got the part.
And so they were still trying to cast Huey,
and it was like almost a year process,
and we still hadn't cast Huey,
and I would read with different actors for Huey
and I would hear the directions that they would give,
and so I just told my agent, I was like, you know,
I can addition for Huey, you know?
Well, what to you think?
Chuck was like, absolutely,
and they asked me could I do
both the roles at the same time?
And I was like, you mean like go back and forth?
And they were like, yeah.
And I was like, sure, give me a beat.
- What the hell is wrong with you, Huey?
If your brother wants to play with Ed and Rummy,
that's his business.
- Ed and Rummy are international criminals.
There he go, hatin' again.
- Boy, stop hating.
- When you're on a cartoon,
the thing that you always run into is being dated.
The thing that's so great about "South Park"
is the way they do that cartoon,
they can turn it around so quickly
so the commentary is always current,
and we were always so concerned with "Boondocks,"
if we were going to be able,
our social commentary was going to be able to remain current
because of the style of that animation
is not a quick turnaround.
And we were able to remain current
and we were able to be a little dangerous,
and there were times I would get the script,
and I would be like, whew, okay,
well, I'm just doing my job, so it's not my fault.
[laughs]
When messages are coming through with humor,
it's kind of like, you know,
a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
- She's endangering the child.
- What if she's clean?
- What if I give her back the baby
and it winds up dead in a week?
You do your job.
Let me do mine.
- Yes, she screwed up, but she's asking for another chance.
Give it to her.
Lydia was so special, special for so many reasons.
One, because I was a mother and I made the decision
to go back to TV
so that I would not be taking roles
that would take me out of the city.
I wanted to be there and I wanted my son
to be in regular school.
I didn't want him to be homeschooled.
So, here I am on a show that takes place in my city,
the city that I'm born and bred in, Southland, LA.
Oh my God.
Westside?
And it was such a powerful experience
to be in the presence of the cast
that I look at them as my brothers to this day,
and then having teachers
like Christopher Chulack and John Wells
that truly embraced me wanting to be a director.
That was really powerful
to have that support at
a time when I was nervous about
saying that I wanted to be a director out loud.
Not only did they hear it, but they also said, oh yeah,
you absolutely can do it,
and they did everything in their power to cosign it.
And I know.
I know you pay for the lies you tell.
You sent a man to jail,
one you ain't never even seen before.
Just 22 years old, young,
and he wants to marry my daughter.
"If Beale Street Could Talk."
I mean, James Baldwin,
Barry Jenkins.
How could I not want to be involved?
What an amazing gift the universe can give.
Now, Alice, I don't think that Frank was talking about hate.
He was just speaking on the truth.
- I trust in God.
I know he cares for me.
- I think of that whole role that I played
through this one scene,
and the thing that was really awesome to me
about what Baldwin did in that scene
and what Barry was able to continue
is when you're looking at this scenario
through the eyes of both matriarchs.
- I hope you're proud
how you raised your daughters.
My girls ain't gon' be bringing no bastards home to feed.
I can tell you that.
- And Sharon is a mother that lives and rules through love.
And then you have Aunjanue's character,
everything that she's doing is coming from a place of fear.
That child that's coming
is your grandchild.
While she would rule from a place of fear
and Sharon would rule from a place of love,
they both at their very center was love,
but our circumstances make us live things out differently.
There's a guy in my trunk.
I knew you were going to tell us to round up the likelies.
I just got to jump on things.
- You knew?
- Yes.
- How do you know he's Seventh K?
- I got a nose for white supremacy,
and he smells like bleach.
My sister and I,
we have a production company and we for the longest
had been talking about doing a story, a film,
on Black Wall Street.
Damon gave me a call, well, an email,
and he said, "I have something that I want you to read,
and I really hope you like it."
It had to be hand delivered to me,
and I started reading the script,
and then I closed it four pages in, 'cause I was like,
is he doing Black Wall Street?
I got chills.
I got chills right now in this moment.
And I was like, what is this?
What is happening?
In just 65 pages,
Damon and this writing team,
they have managed to do a gumbo of genres and it's working
and I'm interested.
I called Damon, and I was like, more, please.
I need to know more.
There was something really powerful about Damon
being able to take the original material,
use it as canon,
use big world-building, actual real-world things
that are happening in our time
that mirror what was happening
when it was originally written
and just propel the story through that space.
- You know, what is going on around us,
it should make everyone angry.
You know, you bourgeois Negroes,
you're too happy with your scraps
to really understand what is at stake here.
- "One Night in Miami,"
it's actually my second film.
My first film was "Let the Church Say Amen,"
but it was a TV film.
I wanted to direct this because still to this moment,
even after having finished "One Night in Miami,"
that we don't get the opportunity to see
more than two Black men together.
It just felt important to me.
When I read Kemp Power's script,
it was very clear that this was his love letter
to being a Black man.
- The problem is at the Copa,
you have to sell that message to a bunch of white folks.
- That don't matter.
They got souls, don't they?
- I feel like as an actor,
there was so much I was absorbing along the way,
but being able to work as a director in TV,
I was really truly able to just be a sponge
and treat it like school.
And I was doing that until that perfect script
that really spoke to me,
that made me feel like I would do whatever I can
to tell this story came along,
and Kemp Powers' "One Night in Miami" finally came my way.
- [Rufus] The angel who hunts down
those who trespass against him with no mercy.
- Open it.
"The Harder They Fall"
was a script that came to me actually
while I was shooting "The Watchmen."
I had an amazing FaceTime with James Samuel,
the writer-director.
You know, I thought the script was good.
You know, I thought it was solid,
but I wasn't sure if I wanted to do a Western
because I didn't really watch Westerns.
And my agent, Lorrie, was like,
"You just gotta meet this guy.
There's something special about him," and I did,
and it was supposed to be just a 30-minute FaceTime.
We ended up being on FaceTime
for like a hour and some change,
and he described the music to me through his eyes.
James speaks through music,
so, literally, he picked up the guitar
and was playing music during our FaceTime,
and I was immediately like, okay, I'm down.
- What the hell you doing?
That ain't no way to board,
you damn, stupid ni- [gun fires]
- He might could have said nincompoop.
- We ain't no nincompoop.
And I was shooting "One Night in Miami" in New Orleans,
and I love the way they talk in New Orleans,
so I decided to kind of root a bit of my accent
and my dialect,
a little Louisiana inspiration
'cause I'd spent so much time there
and the city really embraced us.
The times we're absorbing the most information
is when we don't think that we're learning.
But when you don't feel like you're in a classroom setting,
when you don't feel like you're doing something
because you're being told
that this is something that you have to learn,
I think you're more of a sponge.