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When the role is right for Angela Bassett, only she will do. That’s why the team behind Fox’s 9-1-1 built the show around her — producers and directors crave the strength and self-respect she always brings to the screen. As a young actress, she says, she’d do without rather than take a job “that would degrade Black women or the Black female experience.” BY MARGY ROCHLIN ALWAYS AND ONLY PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN RUSSO

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20 EMMY ROBIN THEDE HAS A STORY ABOUT ANGELA BASSETT. For her HBO series, , Thede envisioned a support but Bassett accepted the part. To understand this act of faith, rewind to group for imposingly glammed-up, lipstick-y women who have a horror 2013, when Murphy requested a meeting with her. At the time, she had of showing their unadorned faces in public. She modeled the leader of the never met Murphy and knew almost nothing about his oeuvre. She expected therapy session — a fierce and supremely confident woman — after Bassett. one of those cursory getting-to-know-you’s, but felt it was only polite to “We kind of painted ourselves into a corner because it couldn’t really steep herself in his hit musical show, Glee, and the first season of his lurid be anyone but her,” says Thede, who dashed off an email asking Bassett to anthology, . “I thought, ‘Wow, how did I sleep on this appear in the first episode. Bassett didn’t just say yes, she surpassed the show?’” she says. wildest expectations of Black Lady’s creator–executive producer–writer– Bassett remembers how quickly the meeting turned from light chit- star. It’s not just the dangly earrings, impeccable manicure and spray of chat to a solid job offer. “He started talking about witches and covens and long hair that make the performance. In a glorious display of her trademark , and I piped up and said, ‘Marie Laveau,’ she recalls, referring restraint, Bassett sells every single syllable of her dialogue, getting laughs to a real-life snake-charming voodoo priestess from the 1800s who is still with a raised eyebrow and a serene “don’t-you-dare-defy-me” voice. legendary in the Big Easy. “When I left the office that day, it was on. I was on “She gave this woman so much respect and a stoic nature that made it so the way to New Orleans shortly thereafter.” much cooler,” Thede says. “And that’s something only Angela Bassett can do.” In 2014, Bassett was Emmy-nominated for Coven; she remained on the tilt-a-whirl carnival ride that is American Horror Story for five seasons. During that stretch she played a blood-sucking Blaxploitation headliner (Hotel) and IS KNOWN FOR HER AIR OF STRENGTH AND an alcoholic actress (Roanoke), then popped up again as Marie Laveau in BASSETT NATURAL SOLEMNITY — as showcased Apocalypse. But she was still surprised when she excitedly cracked open her in her Oscar-nominated turn in What’s Love Got to Do with It — but not script for Freak Show and saw what awaited her. necessarily for being funny. The fact that she was onscreen for less than four “We had such a great season with Coven and I was like, ‘What can top minutes, yet nabbed an Emmy nomination as guest actress for the sketch, this?’ Then I read it and there it is — she has three breasts and a ding-a- proves Thede’s point. “That’s just the power of Angela Bassett,” she says. ling,” says Bassett of Desiree, her tough, implacable, intersex character. “She can show up for a half a day and get nominated for an Emmy because “That was something I’d never seen before. I remember literally tossing the she’s that good, and she deserves it.” script on the sofa and thinking, ‘Ooooo-weee. I got to get up and walk around She was up for an Emmy again in 2020 (her seventh nomination), for for a minute.’ They shocked me with that one.” narrating Disney+’s The Imagineering Story. Meanwhile, she’s in her fourth But she hadn’t come this far to be cowed by prosthetic-enhanced season as the star and an executive producer of Fox’s 9-1-1. The procedural, cleavage. “I thought, ‘I’m in this game, so I guess I’m gonna play.’ And you which revolves around a handful of first responders in Los Angeles, is know what? I had a ball.” famous for its news-of-the-weird calamities — a girl choked by her pet boa A memorable highlight: mastering and performing Desiree’s spinning constrictor, a premature baby trapped inside a toilet pipe. Bassett’s gravitas tri-tassel dance. “At the end of the scene, the entire crew, majorly male, helps anchor the series and make its events seem almost normal. broke into spontaneous applause,” Bassett recalls. “I felt quite accomplished Her steely LAPD patrol sergeant, Athena Grant, balances a demanding — and a wee bit ashamed at the same time.” job, two kids (Corinne Massiah, Marcanthonee Jon Reis), a hot new firefighter husband (Peter Krause) and an ex (Rockmond Dunbar) who identifies as LGBTQ. IN , BASSETT WAS SENT AT AGE TEN MONTHS That she has so much going on is no coincidence. Long before Thede BORN TO NORTH CAROLINA TO BE RAISED BY HER FATHER’S dreamed up a role that only Angela Bassett could do justice, prolific SISTER, AUNT GOLDEN. Asked to trace the special sort of unflappable showrunner had done the same. fortitude that she radiates onscreen, she points to her upbringing in St. As 9-1-1 showrunner Tim Minear tells it, before Murphy left for Netflix, Petersburg, , where she relocated at age four to live with her social- he created the series as a goodbye gift to Dana Walden, who was then co- worker single mother, Betty, and her younger sister, D’nette. head of Fox Television. “We were walking around the lot and he said, ‘I had “Maybe it’s just an amalgamation of how I was raised, who raised me, this idea about a show we should call 9-1-1, and there can be a 911 operator. where I’m from, history and timing,” she says. “Growing up in the ’60s, you And I think that Angela Bassett should be a cop. I think America wants to see know, during those turbulent times, you had to have fight and grit. It also Angela Bassett in a uniform,’” Minear recalls. “We built the show around her. might be about growing up without a lot of extras, but what you have is clean, She was on the billboard in our heads from Day One.” it’s what you can afford. You know, just sort of learning what your values are.” There was no completed script or even a fully fleshed-out character, She knew her mother wanted her to get a college degree. But it wasn’t

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22 EMMY TelevisionAcademy.com 23 until the eleventh grade that how to apply and to which universities came into low-budget movie that I think we filmed at a Smart & Final [market] in Los focus. “As a teenager, counseling wasn’t available to me,” she says, adding Angeles, I was one of the leads. I didn’t disappear after the first act. I didn’t that it was a director at Upward Bound, a summer enrichment program, who die. I wasn’t the sacrificial lamb. And it was shot out of sequence, so I could pointed her toward Yale. use it as a training ground, figure out how to craft a character that way. And Though she’d been a straight-A student in high school, her first year on if I fell on my face, it wouldn’t be in front of the whole world. Just fans of the the New Haven campus required a level of determination that wasn’t always Critters franchise — and they were on number four, so there had to be some.” easy to summon. “It was overwhelming, and I didn’t know the avenues that Think about it: just a couple of short years after Critters 4, Bassett would were available to me, that there were tutors,” Bassett says. star as in What’s Love Got to Do with It, land an Oscar nomination She recalls the many nights she spent in her dorm room weeping and and become the first African American to win a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture — Comedy or Musical. Bassett in her LAPD blues on Fox’s 9-1-1 These days, when strangers approach her on the street, they give her the Wakanda salute in acknowledgment of her role as Queen Ramonda in Black Panther or quiz her on her role as jazz saxophonist Dorothea Williams in Disney/’s animated film, Soul. There are lonely hearts who want to talk about her hit date movies, like or How Stella Got Her Groove Back. But twenty-seven years after the release of What’s Love, some fans just want to share how they were changed by her searing portrayal of a little girl from Nutbush, Tennessee, who endured unspeakable hardships to become the so-called Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll. They tell her, she says, “how they were able to walk away from that situation in their life, because they did have this bit of entertainment about the life of a woman who had gone through the very thing they had. By [seeing us] shining a light on domestic violence, they knew they weren’t alone.”

KNOWS WHAT SORT OF STREET CONFESSIONS WHO BASSETT’S 9-1-1 CHARACTER WILL INSPIRE? In a season-three arc, after Athena tracks down a serial rapist in a storage facility, he brutally beats her. By the finale, she is just starting to confront her own trauma with Dr. Kara Sanford, a therapist played by Brooke Shields. Potentially an operatic moment — she’s covered in bruises, her arm is in a sling —

Bassett grounds it instead, her face filled with wary defensiveness, realizing FOX that maybe she isn’t the indestructible bad-ass she always thought she was. “She’s taking on a character of extreme complexities, making infinitesimal choices throughout her performance,” says costar Aisha Hinds, who plays giving herself “a good talking-to,” noting, “It was a two-way conversation. I’d Athena’s best friend, Hen. “Which gives it the nuances to find a home in the stand in front of my mirror and say, [impatiently] ‘Are you going to quit?’ and hearts of viewers. This is a Black woman in the world, working as a police officer then I’d answer, [sob-choked voice] ‘No.’ Then it would be, ‘Okay, how long do in Los Angeles in an interracial marriage. She’s so layered in this role.” you want to cry? Fifteen minutes?’ Then I’d say, ‘Yeah, fifteen.’ Then it would After a protracted pandemic hiatus, 9-1-1 started shooting season four be ‘Okay, fifteen minutes, then stop, wash your face and do whatever it is you in mid-October. Sure, there were a lot of safety protocols — face shields, have to do.’” regular testing, a crew member whose entire job was to spray everything By the time she entered the workforce, she had a bachelor’s degree with disinfectant. “But I was happy to go back to work — and we finally did,” in African-American studies from Yale and a master’s in fine arts from the Bassett recalls. fabled Yale School of Drama. She landed appearances on soaps like Search She’s speaking by telephone from St. Petersburg, in the home she for Tomorrow, a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial and a tour with the New bought for her mother with earnings from How Stella Got Her Groove Back. York–based . Bassett took what came her way — She’s visiting for the holidays, along with her fifteen-year-old twins, Bronwyn bit parts as a prostitute or a clipboard-carrying nurse. But she always knew, and Slater, and her husband of twenty-three years, Courtney B. Vance (the even then, that sometimes you walk away. spouses are also producing partners in Bassett Vance Productions). “Early on I auditioned for a small, small part where a character takes this “Being on a one-hour drama, it’s hard to get here, but I try to as often as woman’s head and pushes it down into a bowl of dog food,” she says. “There I can,” Bassett says, her voice suddenly softening. “It really is my happy place. I was, living in my $213-a-month apartment and thinking, ‘If I don’t take this I’m looking out the back of the house onto the bay, and there’s a beautiful sky role, I’m at the unemployment office.’ But even though I was just starting and clouds and a sweet breeze.” out, I knew I could not be so desperate. I thought, ‘I’d rather stand in that line This year, in addition to playing Athena on 9-1-1, she’ll reprise her role as than take something that would degrade Black women or the Black female a CIA director in the next Mission: Impossible and return to Wakanda for Black experience.’” Panther 2. She can’t wait. Her first film industry break came in 1991, when director “To perform is a reason why you say yes — and hopefully it won’t just be cast her as a mom in . But her turning point, the dramatic for the monetary gain,” she says. “To find your passion when you’re young, and experience that changed everything for her, was a year later in the science- [years later] still be in the game? And to be respected by others and thought of fiction comedy horror film Critters 4. as a professional and a person with class? I just think it’s sacred.” If you’re laughing, she’s okay with that. “In most movies, if you are the Black woman, you are the girlfriend to the Go behind the scenes of emmy’s cover shoot with Angela Bassett at best friend of the white guy who is the lead,” she explains. “But in that little TelevisionAcademy.com/cover.

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