The New Yorker Radio Hour - Angela Bassett on Playing Tina Turner and Queen Ramonda of Wakanda

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

It’s been almost three decades since Angela Bassett emerged in Hollywood as a “totem of empowered Black womanhood,” as Michael Schulman puts it—known for groundbreaking roles in films like “What’s Love Got to Do with It” and “How Stella Got Her Groove Back.” Now, at sixty-four, Bassett is nominated for an Oscar for her performance in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” As the fierce, grieving Queen Ramonda, she is the first actor nominated for any Marvel movie. Bassett speaks with Schulman about her preparation for the film, and reflects on how a poetry recitation drove her to acting as a young person. “It was the first recognition for me, at fifteen, that drama, that theatre, that words, that passion from one human being could move another,” she says. “And that maybe I had a gift for it.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. 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. In preparing to interview Angela Bassett, I kind of threw myself in Angela Bassett Film Festival. I went back and watched or re-watched 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. And she kind of 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 Ramanda in The Black Panther movies. And she's nominated for Best Supporting Actress this year for Black Panther Wakanda Forever. And 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? Well, here's the thing.

We did very little on the green screen here. So the throne room, the throne room was there. Looking through the floor, maybe outside of the throne room, that's not there. but everything, and it's humongous, it's huge. Jure, there's something that I need to tell you about your brother. We had trees and bushes, and we had water. We had water for, you know, yards and yards and yards and yards. And Namor came up out of the water.

I am not a woman who enjoys so repeating herself. Who are you? So part of what you've done in this role as Queen Ramanda in the Black Panther films, you know, they take place in Africa but in an imaginary country, Wakanda. How did you develop the accent for this, you know, imaginary nation? Did you have sort of accent coaching or how did you get into the accent? No, we absolutely did. We had the same coach, Ms. Beth, and she's there on set.

And 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, you know. And so I would say it, you know, he didn't want to play around with me, I must say. He just wanted to marry me, you know. So that would sort of get me in the zone. 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. And as for the identity of the attackers. 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. When we were young, my mother, my sister, we would often, you know, gather around the stereo and pick out a favorite song of the day.

And mine might be Gladys Knight of heard it through the grapevine, you know, or Nancy Wilson, guess who I saw today, you know. A real story. Guess who I saw today? I went in town to shop around for something new. Later when I was in an enrichment program Upward Bound at Eckert College, we would have talent night, so we would have Miss Upward Bound or something like that, and you would have to display a talent.

And I would, I didn't have a way. I didn't have a way. I didn't. I couldn't sing or tap dance. but I loved poetry. So I found poetry and recitation. I found an album of Ruby D's where she did, you know, the poems of Langston Hughes. And I heard 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, though the white day is done, then rest it cool evening beneath a tall tree while night comes on gently, dark. She stirred something in there with it, some fire, some heat, some excitement. And it just, it just opened up my whole imagination. And so 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.

You know, sin for this, sin for this one, send for that one. And if they don't come, send for a spear. And it just goes on and on and on. And nobody comes. Sent for me. And 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 there.

you know, and it was just the first recognition that for me at 15, that, that drama, that theater, that words, that passion from one human being could move another. And then maybe I had something, maybe I had a gift for it. Well, you really spent your 20s as a working actor, a lot of it in New York. You were doing sort of 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? Graduated from school and maybe about a year later got cast as an understudy in a bus and truck tour of this play called Colored Pee. people's time, which was from the Negro Ensemble Company. So this theater that had done one of my feces on 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, you know, El Scott Caldwell on and on, Carol Maylard, who's a member of Sweet Honey in the Rock. So different, you know, 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 it. I hate Kentucky Fried chicken. And did you have like day jobs throughout this time? Like I read that you worked as a receptionist at a beauty salon. Georgia Klinger Salon. It was a challenge because I had my, you know, my agent, they're sending you out and trying to do this thing that I've studied for, that I have these loans for. So I'm, you know, in this little hallway sitting next to other, you know, other ladies answering the phone and booking appointments for facials with Miss Katrina and Miss Jocelyn and Miss

whoever from Europe. And I think they are one lady from Jamaica. But we would have literally 45 minutes off for lunch, you know, 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 cross town. 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 audition. because I'm worried about getting back to work on time.

So 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 or this situation. or whatever, and I would go show him and say, oh, it's Friday and 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 times. That's exciting. And I said, oh, I have an audition. When's your audition? I was like,

it's at, it's at two. Well, it's 12. Do you need to go get ready? Go get ready. I just couldn't believe it. He knew that, you know, this, this, this was a means to an end, that here with him was not the end. Angela Bassett, speaking with the New Yorker's Michael Shulman, more in a moment. Well, 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. You were, the film was trying to open during Tina's world tour and you've said you were working 20 hour days, you know, fractured of the hand, you were dancing in high heels. What was it like to actually film? And how did you cope with just the incredibly hard work and the pressure of making it? 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, you know. I would literally put on my earphones, put in the CD disc, or whatever. I'm listening to her songs and listen to it until I fall asleep. I would listen to have a phrase over and over and over and over again and try to dissect it. You know, did she inhale? Did she exhale? Did she, you know, and I would just study each and every detail within a flage.

or half a phrase. Oh. There's something on my mind. I would just study the O part to get it perfectly right. Does she inhale before she said that? Does she exhale at the end of that? Somebody please. Please tell me what's wrong.

I think I lost my voice a couple times. They would send someone a doctor who would put some tubing up through the sinuses, which is very scary. And even though it wasn't my vocals you were hearing, I was certainly full out singing. Getting up at 5 a.m., working out with Michael Peters, who worked famously with Michael Jackson. I love that. And 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 enjoyed 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 hurt, not a, you know, just shred it down. We would do a dance number and then say, okay, cut. All right, let's do it again. And 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 like, just trying to get your breath at the end of it. You know, every now and then, I think you might like to hear something from us nice and easy. But there's just one thing. You see, we never. ever do nothing. Nice and easy. And this role really just catapulted you into this echelon of stardom. You know, you did these two movies waiting to exhale and how Stella got her groove back that are, you know,

they're almost like a genre unto themselves, like these movies that were being made, sort of around you about the romantic lives of black women. And I mean, what did it feel like to sort of be at the center of a kind of movie being made for, you know, for an audience that hadn't been catered to in that way? I mean, did your relationship with the audience change? It felt fantastic, felt phenomenal. You know, we hadn't seen ourselves in that way, especially waiting to exhale just for a black woman and for black women and their friends and their support system for each other. and they're classy and they're beautiful and they're, you know, and they have, I mean, they have a joie de vivre and, 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, you know. Well, it's an obvious precursor to sex in the city. There you go. And we let that moment. We led that movement and First Wives Club and all that that followed. Because before then, here we are. We are, yes, sir, may I get your coffee?

I'm the secretary or, you know, that sort of thing. But 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. So I've noticed in the past couple of years, Angela, you've been doing a bit more comedy. I mean, there was the episode you were in of Master of None, which playing Lena Waite's mother in the Thanksgiving episode, which was an absolutely brilliant performance in a terrific episode of television. You were in a black lady sketch show and a sketch called Angela Bassett is the bad as bitch.

And I'm wondering, you know, did this, did some? something about comedy appeal to you or about sort of winking to the audience about, you know, sort of your rep as this just sort of as this bad bitch that you wanted to embrace? My whole thing was drama. I was just drama queen, just stern and drama. But 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, you know? Well, I mean, you were certainly from, especially,

from the evidence of Master of Nunn, you just have this incredible comic timing. I mean, there's a lot of incredible side-eye acting in that episode when your daughter brings home, like these sort of like flusy girlfriends over Thanksgiving. Absolutely hysterical. Thank you. Yeah, just someone who's, you know, doesn't understand it completely,

but loves her baby and wants to be. best for them so. What is the problem? Just in no way that I even have to have this conversation with you. What conversation? I'm sitting here being normal. You acting like a crazy person. Ma, I'm gay. What? I'm gay.

And it was an important story to tell, an important moment. So 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, you know, to have those moments in, you know, 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 said, uh-uh, evidently, it's not. And they book their Jamaican or their Caribbean vacation and, you know, and get their groove back to have an opportunity to speak to folk that's been a great blessing. Well, well, thank you, first of all, for all these great performances over the years that have been really fun for me to revisit and a good look at the

Oscars. Do you know what you're going to wear? I don't, Michael Schoeman. I don't, but I was looking at this frock I have on today. It's a lovely shade of purple, maybe, and purple. And purple. And purple. who is the color of royalty. Oh, such a responsibility. 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 Kate Blanchett, crossword editor Will Shorts, and many more.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbes of Tune Arts with additional music by Alexis Quadrato and Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Breda Green, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Ingofen and Puccibewele, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Harrison Keithline and Meher Batia. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.