David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'm going to turn things over now to Michael Schulman, a staff writer at the magazine who covers culture and entertainment.

Michael Schulman: In preparing to interview Angela Bassett, I threw myself an Angela Bassett film festival. I went back and watched and rewatched her great film performances from the '90s. There's her Titanic star-making performance as Tina Turner in What's Love Got to Do with It. She ruled the screen in the '90s and she's worked really steadily since but she's had this really interesting resurgence lately, thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Angela plays Queen Ramonda in the Black Panther movies and she's nominated for Best Supporting Actress this year for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. She's actually the first actor to be nominated for a Marvel movie for an Academy Award.

We talked about her role in the Black Panther movies, and I was curious about the particular challenges of acting in a Marvel movie, for instance, do you have to act a lot in front of a green screen?

Angela Bassett: Here's the thing we did very little on the green screen here. The throne room, the throne room was there. Looking through the floor may be outside of the throne room that's not there but everything and it's humongous. It's huge.

Video clip: Shuri there's something that I need to tell you about your brother.

Angela: We had trees and bushes and we had water. We had water for yards and yards and yards and yards and yards and Namor came up out of the water.

Video clip: I am not a woman who enjoys repeating herself. Who are you?

Michael: Part of what you've done in this role as Queen Ramonda in the Black Panther films they take place in Africa but in an imaginary country, Wakanda. How did you develop the accent for this imaginary nation? Did you have sort of accent coaching or how did you get into the accent?

Angela: We absolutely did. We had the same coach who is Beth and she's there on set. I would grab maybe three key phrases that I found on YouTube of Winnie Mandela or of certain south African women maybe a worker and before a scene, I would recite them to get me in the space you say, "He didn't want to play around, he just wanted to marry me." I would say it, "He didn't want to play around with me I must say, he just wanted to marry me," so that would get me in the zone.

Video clip: There was another attack on one of our outreach facilities. Proof of the involvement of a member state is being uploaded to your mobile devices as we speak. As for the identity of the attackers--

Michael: Angela grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida. She lived there with her younger sister and her mother, a social worker who had her own instinct for performing.

Angela: When we were young my mother, my sister we would often gather around the stereo and pick out a favorite song of the day and mine might be Gladys Knight, I Heard It Through The Grapevine, or Nancy Wilson, Guess Who I Saw Today. A real story.

Guess who I saw today, my dear

I went in town to shop around

For something new,

Angela: Later when I was in an enrichment program Upward Bound at Eckerd College we would have talent nights or we would have Miss Upward Bound or something like that. You would have to display a talent and I couldn't sing or tap dance but I loved poetry. I found poetry and recitation. I found an album of Ruby Dee's where she did the poems of Langston Hughes. It was more than just reciting the poems, the words. It was more than that. She put something in there with it.

To fling my arms wide

In some place of the sun,

To whirl and to dance

Till the white day is done.

Then rest at cool evening

Beneath a tall tree

While night comes on gently,

Dark like me

Angela: She stirred something in there with it, some fire, some heat, some excitement. It just bing, it just opened up my whole imagination. I copied her. I took about three of those poems and I strung them together and I did this very long poem and it's got this repetitive thing going on with it sin for the sin for this one, sin for that one sin, and if they don't come sin for [unintelligible 00:05:53] and it just goes on and on and on and nobody comes sent for me. The audience just stood up and they clapped and they clapped and they responded and my knees got very weak and I was trying not to go down on them and it was just the first recognition that for me at 15 the drama, the theater, the words, the passion from one human being could move another and then maybe I had something, maybe I had a gift for it.

Michael: You really spent your 20s as a working actor, a lot of it in New York. You were doing parts in soap operas or sitcoms or what have you. What were you being cast as when you were just going out for roles in your 20s trying to make it?

Angela: Graduate from school and maybe about a year later got cast as an understudy in a busing truck tour of this play called Colored People's Time which was from the Negro Ensemble Company. This theater that done one of my theses at Yale this was an old play that they had done. They took it around to Syracuse and different little places like that. Sam Jackson was in it. I remember L. Scott Caldwell, on and on. Carol Maillard, who's a member of Sweet Honey in The Rock. Just working actors in New York. There wasn't a lot of television in New York at that time. I think there was The Equalizer and The Cosby Show.

I remember I got a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial and I was Happy Chicken. I like Kentucky Fried until about the fourth hour. Then I hate Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Michael: Did you have like day jobs throughout this time? I read that you worked as a receptionist at a beauty salon.

Angela: Yes, Georgette Klinger Salon. It was a challenge because I have my agent there's sending you out. I'm trying to do this thing that I've studied for, that I have these loans for. I'm in this little hallway sitting next to other ladies answering the phone and booking appointments for facials with Ms. Katrina, and Ms. Jocelyn and miss whoever from Europe, and I think they're one lady from Jamaica. We would have literally 45 minutes off for lunch on the east side of New York, on Madison Avenue, because I would run in, I would blurt out the audition, and then try to run back uptown and crosstown, and then I would get reprimanded for being 10 minutes late or whatever. It was just so stressful.

I knew I can't give my best in the auditions because I'm worried about getting back to work on time. I heard about another job that came up, gave my notice at the salon, and I went to Rockefeller Center, one of those tall buildings, and start working for this one gentleman. He would send me to AP, Associated Press, to their photo departments. He said, oh, I need slides on what's going on in this war, this situation, or whatever and I would go show him and say, oh, it's Friday I need you to take these slides and fly them to DC to the office on the shuttle. Oh, okay so I get to do that a couple of times. That's exciting. I say, oh, I have an audition. When's your audition? I was like it's at 2:00.

Well, it's 12:00, do you need to go get ready, go get ready. I just couldn't believe it. He knew that this was a means to an end that here with him was not the end.

Michael: Let's talk for a moment about, What’s Love Got to Do with It. An absolutely, incredible film. From what I've read it was a really difficult shoot. The film was trying to open during Tina's world tour and you've said you were working 20-hour days, fractured of hand. You were dancing in high heels. What was it like to actually to film and how did you cope with just the incredibly hard work and the pressure of making it?

Angela: Oh, I just remember thinking you might lose a battle but we're trying to win a war, so you just kept going, and going, and going, and that's how you did it. I would literally put on my earphones, put in the CD disc, or whatever. I'm listening to her songs and listen to it till I fall asleep. I would listen to half a phrase over, and over, and over, and over, and over again and try to dissect it. Did she inhale, did she exhale? Did she and I would just study each and every detail within a phrase or half a phrase.

Oh, there's something on my mind.

I would just study the whole part to get it perfectly right.

[music]

Angela: Did she inhale before she said that, did she exhale at the end of that?

Oh somebody, please, please tell me what's wrong.

[music]

Angela: I think I lost my voice a couple of times, they would send someone, a doctor who would put some tubing up through the sinuses which is very scary. Even though it wasn't my vocals you were hearing I was certainly full-out singing getting up at 5:00 AM, working out with Michael Peters who worked famously with Michael Jackson. I loved that. He would just put me through the paces for about 10 hours. I literally would eat standing up, I never sat at a table and enjoy breakfast, lunch, or dinner. I was just so frazzled on black coffee, plain chicken breasts, and white potatoes, and green beans. That's literally all that I ate during that time.

Working out everything. Just shred it down. We would do a dance number and he'd okay say cut. All right let's do it again. I literally say can an actor just have 60 seconds? Can actors have-- Can we have 60 seconds because it felt as if you had swallowed a wool sweater. You're just trying to get your breath at the end of it.

Every now and then I think you might like to hear

Somethin' from us, nice and easy

But there's just one thing you see

We never, ever do nothin' nice and easy.

Michael: This role really just catapulted you into this [unintelligible 00:13:54] stardom. You did these two movies Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back. They're almost a genre unto themselves these movies that were being made around you about the romantic lives of Black women. What did it feel like to be at the center of a movie being made for an audience that hadn't been catered to in that way? Did your relationship with the audience change?

Angela: It felt fantastic, felt phenomenal. If you know we hadn't seen ourselves in that way especially, Waiting To Exhale just for Black woman and four Black women, and their friends and their support system for each other, and they're classy, and they're beautiful, and they have joie de vivre [French language] and they have pain and they're going through things. They think they're at the end and they'll never find love, they're being dogged out. We--

Michael: It's a obvious precursor to Sex and the City.

Angela: There you go, and we led that moment, we led that movement. First Wives Club and all that that follow, because before then here we are yes sir may I get your coffee I'm the secretary or that sort of thing. It felt wonderful that times had changed and here were these movies that featured Black women in complicated and loving relationships and we could do it well and it wasn't a joke, so I was very happy with them.

Michael: I've noticed in the past couple of years Angela you've been doing a bit more comedy. There was the episode you were in of Master of None playing Lena Waithe's mother in the Thanksgiving episode which was an absolutely brilliant performance and a terrific episode of television. You were in a black lady sketch show in a sketch called Angela Bassett Is The Baddest Bitch. I'm wondering did something about comedy appeal to you or about winking to the audience about your rep as this bad bitch that you wanted to embrace?

Angela: My whole thing was drama. I was just drama queen, just [unintelligible 00:16:27] and drama. Off-camera my friends say I'm pretty funny so I appreciate that that's the way they saw me and that I got that opportunity.

Michael: You were certainly from especially from the evidence of Master of None you just have this incredible comic timing. There's a lot of incredible side-eye acting in that episode when your daughter brings home these sort of like floozy girlfriends over Thanksgiving, absolutely hysterical.

Angela: Thank you. Just someone who doesn't understand it completely, beloveds her baby, and wants the best for them.

Speaker 3: What is the problem?

Speaker 4: Just annoyed that I [unintelligible 00:17:19] to have this conversation with you.

Speaker 3: What conversation? I'm sitting here being normal, you acting like a crazy person.

Speaker 4: Mom, I'm gay.

Speaker 3: You what?

Speaker 4: I'm gay.

Angela: It was an important story to tell an important moment. I was so happy that I was able to be there, and the eyes that saw it, and the change that happened for people who were able to speak to their parents or it spoke to them to have those moments just from acting whether it's what's love, and people who have been in abusive relationships and got out of it, or whether it's Stella and those who thought well at 40 it's over and they say, oh, oh, evidently it's not. They book their Jamaican or their Caribbean vacation and get their groove back to have an opportunity to speak to folk. That's been a great blessing.

Michael: Thank you first of all for all these great performances over the years that have been really fun for me to revisit and good look at the Oscars, you know what you're going to wear.

Angela: I don't Michael Schulman. I don't but I was looking at this frock I have on today. It's a lovely shade of purple maybe, and purple is the color of royalty, oh it's such a responsibility. [laughs]

[music]

David Remnick: The New Yorker's Michael Schulman speaking with Angela Bassett. She's nominated for an Oscar for her role in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The conversation also appears in written form in the New Yorker's interviews issue this week alongside conversations with Cate Blanchett, crossword editor Will Shortz, and many more.

[00:19:29] [END OF AUDIO]

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