March 2020 | Rolling Stone | 71
After five years on 227, King enrolled at USC,
at her mom’s insistence. She liked acting but was
considering becoming a dentist, until the direc-
tor John Singleton cast her in his debut, Boyz n
the Hood, and then in his follow-up starring Janet
Jackson and Tupac Shakur, Poetic Justice. After
that, she left school, and has had at least one
credit every year since but one.
Along the way she worked with, well, every-
one, and made friends on every rung of the
Hollywood ladder. She became a big enough
star to be a regular guest at Prince’s post-Oscars
parties. Actually, she became a big enough
star to drink a little too much champagne with
Reese Witherspoon en route to one, konk out
on a couch head-to-head with her while their
embarrassed husbands played pool nearby, and
still get invited back.
“Who falls asleep at a Prince party?” she says,
cackling at the memory.
Her self-possession, combined with what
Lindelof calls “incredible taste,” allowed King
to navigate Hollywood with basically none of
the missteps and misfortunes so many actors
experience. No scandal, no regrettable projects.
Her life has not been without heartbreak — she
endured her parents’ painful divorce as a girl,
and then her own, in 2007, after 10 years of mar-
riage to the father of her 24-year-old son, Ian —
but rather than metastasize into lasting psychic
wounds, it seems only to have fortified her.
“After she won the Oscar, a part of me was
like, ‘Oh, that’s gonna be the thing that finally
changes her,’” says Lindelof, who first worked
with King on his HBO series The Leftovers. “But it
somehow humbled her even more. She didn’t do
that thing actors do, where they’re dismissive;
she understands the Oscar means something.
But she identifies the things that are real and
authentic and doesn’t waste time on the rest.”
Her close friend of 20 years, Gabrielle Union,
tells me, “Some people, their attitude, their
personality, the access they allow, depend on
how they’re doing. She’s been the exact same.With all the awards, the same. When you’re in a
drought, the same. She’s consistent, authentic,
and clear in who she is. And she’s fun as fuck.”D
IRECTING A MOVIE has King ener-
gized in a new way. She’s helmed
plenty of TV episodes, but One Night
in Miami is her first time being a field
general on a project of this scale. “I’m a control
enthusiast, so it works out really well,” she jokes.
Perhaps the only part of the process she’s
not looking forward to is answering questions
about whether she’s picked up the gauntlet
she dropped at the Golden Globes: making the
production 50 percent female. Though her
company isn’t overseeing the film, she and her
producers reached for parity — and ran into
problems that plague so many industries.
“In a lot of places — construction, special ef-
fects, makeup, gaffers... there just aren’t women
that even do those jobs,” she says. “So, I’ve been
talking to the men who were hired in those po-
sitions about outreach programs. Because there
are a lot of women in regular construction who
probably have no idea that construction workers
are needed to build sets.” She also plans to
suggest that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences begin similar initiatives with per-
forming-arts schools. “They have the tentacles to
create [change],” she says, “but it probably takes
a person like me to say, ‘Have we ever thought
about this? What can I do to help it happen?’ ”
Of course, King knew from the moment she
issued that challenge she’d have a steep uphill
climb. And despite the obstacles, she notes that
74 of the 129 people thus far hired to work on
One Night in Miami are either female or of color.
“I did say, ‘It’s not gonna be easy,’ ” she says.
“But no one heard that. Women that understand
this from an experiential place heard it and
knew this was a call to action for all of us. But
I saw a couple of writings, by white men, that
were like, ‘This is ridiculous that she would say
this.’ Well, just the fact that you said this is ri-
diculous means that you’re one of those people
that’s the wall or door that we have to kick the
fuck down, and say, ‘Stay down!’ as we go and
get people on board to make sure we have a
future that’s reflective of our population.”
The intensity of her gaze recalls a point ear-
lier in our conversation, when she talked about
the moment acting grabbed ahold of her as a
young girl. She described seeing Sally Field’s
Oscar-winning portrayal of a single-mom-turned-
labor-organizer in the 1979 biopic Norma Rae. “I
just remember thinking, ‘I want to make people
feel,’ ” she’d said, her eyes widening. “I was not
old enough to really understand what was going
on, but I knew she was fighting for something,
and I knew she believed in it.”