It’s Good to be Regina King

t is the second day of 2019, and while the rest of the country is gently reneging on resolutions they made 24 hours before, Regina King is hurtling into the future. We’re sitting in a small room in a Beverly Hills mansion. She has spent the afternoon shifting from one soft power stance to another in a verdant backyard, making the unseasonably chilly day look warm.

With the photo shoot complete, King is readying herself to crisscross the country to accept various pieces of hardware for her resonant performance in If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel that Annapurna is distributing. It’s the role that shot her straight to the front of the line for a best-supporting-actress Oscar.

First up is the Palm Springs International Film Festival—a star-studded gala where she will be shouted out onstage by an exuberant Timothée Chalamet. At the end of a long and grateful speech, the actress will wind things down. “I love being an actor,” she’ll say. Then she’ll pause, smiling before letting everyone in on an open secret: “It just feels good being Regina King.” A few days after that, she’ll be at the Golden Globes, accepting a statuette for supporting actress in a motion picture.

But before all this, in her cozy post-photo-shoot loungewear, King would like to know, genuinely, if what she’s experiencing is normal.

Photograph by Sharif Hamza. Styled by Jaime Kay Waxman.

“How long has it been like this?” she asks, back in the rented mansion, referring broadly to the process of campaigning for film awards—which has, over the last few decades, morphed into an increasingly chaotic, if glamorous, obstacle course. Actors must serve untold hours of face time as their studios spend millions to net Oscar dreams, all while understanding that these dreams can be undone by the simplest gaffe.

King’s disbelief should not be mistaken for a lack of gratitude or total unfamiliarity. She has a trio of Emmys to her name and more than 30 years in the industry under her belt. It’s just that, for her, the relative major leagues of the Oscars race are uncharted territory. For years, she had thought the divide between film and TV—particularly the opinion that one medium was more prestigious than the other—had all but faded away. “It is very cool to be 47 and [have] this shit be new,” she says in that familiar voice, the one with the gentle rasp and native Angeleno curl. “Having this experience now, I see a whole ‘nother regard for film.”

King, a performer whose power is both daring and familiar, is uniquely positioned to know. Her career has been on a logical, steady ascent, one that has seen her go from solid supporting player to dominant scene-stealer. If you took a bird’s-eye view of it, you’d see a 33-year series of quantifiable upgrades—starting in 1985, when the 14-year-old with sunset-brown eyes joined the NBC sitcom 227. She cut her teeth watching star and producer Marla Gibbs command the show in front of and behind the scenes. “It was like college,” she tells me. “Marla was the first boss lady I got to see up close and personal.”

Gabrielle Union has a story about snorkeling that ends with King rescuing her from a riptide, without hesitation. This is the kind of anecdote friends and co-stars often provide for this sort of magazine piece, intended to illustrate a subject’s likability. But Union’s comes with a borderline subversive punch line. A different black actress, she jokes, might have seen her competition drowning and turned away—the subtext being that this industry has a long history of pitting actresses (and especially actresses of color) against each other.

“But when I say she literally saved my life that day, she literally saved my life that day. That’s who she is,” Union says. “There are very few people that everybody categorically fucks with—and Regina is just one of those people.”

King frequently generates this kind of praise: that she’s not only real but real as hell. It’s vaulted her to a special place in the industry and especially among her black peers and fans, a recognition she finds deeply meaningful. King has a sixth sense when she’s out on the street and a black fan is about to approach her. “I feel the hug already,” she says. “It’s that family-reunion feeling.”

That feeling is on her mind when she’s plotting out potential future projects, like her Chisholm biopic, or one of her other dream movies—a black generational family story akin to Parenthood, Ron Howard’s 1989 dramedy. If this film ever comes to fruition, she wants to direct it and produce it with her sister Reina. Their company is called, naturally, Royal Ties.

King’s family has long been a source of support; Jackée Harry, who co-starred with King on 227, remembers the small army that would accompany the then teen actress to set. “She had her mom and her aunt and her sisters,” Harry says. “She had a tight bond, a tight family unit. She was taking care of them.”

But for all her talents, King still has a certain blindness when it comes to her status as a perennial awards front-runner. She never anticipated that she would be honored by the TV Academy three times: “Really?” she told the crowd as she took the Emmy podium that night to accept the third prize. “Say word.”

And even after those nearly consecutive wins, King was not at all prepared for the Olympic-level sport that is running an Oscar campaign. She’s learning everything as she goes, including the existence of entities such as the National Board of Review, which in November named her best supporting actress for Beale Street. (“I’m like, ‘Yes—what’s the Board of Review?’” she later joked in her acceptance speech.)

Courtesy of Tatum Mangus / Annapurna Pictures.