Emmy Watch: Regina King in "Watchmen"
Saturday, March 21, 2020 at 10:55AM by Eric Blume
We here at TFE are big fans of Regina King, as you know. She’s been performing in the business for over 35 years, and has weathered career ups and downs as all good working actors do. She's risen to the top of the field in the last few years with three Emmys for very interesting and strong roles in TV.
Personally, I had split feelings about her Oscar win for Best Supporting Actress last year for If Beale Street Could Talk. As a fan of her and her work, I was thrilled to see Regina King get an Oscar. But I found Beale Street to be heavy-handed and unconvincing, and the movie gave her too few notes to play. She brought everything she could to the role and the film, but it would have been more thrilling to see her win for a juicy, complex role.
Which makes what Regina King does on Watchmen so exciting...
King’s role as the main figure in HBO’s one-and-done limited series thrusts her center stage, and she gets to be essentially ALL the things: tough, tender, funny, intelligent, cunning, vulnerable, you name it.
The mechanics of Watchmen are too labyrinthine and dense to do it justice in summary, but King plays Angela Abar, a cop with an alter ego (Sister Night) around whom all the plot strands cohere. Aside from the unique joy of watching a 49-year-old African American woman kicking ass without even taking names, we see Angela as a fully sexualized woman, a nurturing mom, a brilliant police officer, and a gutsy, funny broad in charge of most scenes and situations. Basically, the writers have crafted her a fully-realized, deeply human character; it's one hell of a role.
King even gets an extended run of wonderfully underplayed comedy in the penultimate episode where she meets her future husband in a bar, in which she takes a very prickly narrative thread and sustains it with playful skill.
It’s impossible to talk at length about Watchmen, because the show is truly some kind of crazy genius, that rare project where layers of fiction, mythology, and genre are synthesized with such sophistication, grace, and wit that you are on a high from the sheer balls of its creators. While all of the talented artists associated with the show are on the same page, credit show runner Damon Lindelof for yet another TV masterpiece in the league of his previous knockouts The Leftovers and Lost.
While on the topic of the show, special note should also go to the other incredible performers. Jeremy Irons hasn’t been this inspired in years, and he brings his uncanny ability to be simultaneously electrifying and dry to each scene. Tim Blake Nelson finally gets a role that harnesses his talent but gives him some scale to play. Hong Chau finds continual notes of droll deadpan that are gloriously funny. And Jean Smart could very well be the MVP with her smashing accomplishment as an FBI head with many secrets: she’s divine.
But back to Regina King. Lindelof evidently built the show around her, after collaborating with her on The Leftovers, and breaking a rule of his to not work with actors in multiple projects. It’s easy to lean into King’s incredible warmth as an actor (and, it seems, human) and still have her deliver beyond expectations. But Watchmen gifted King with a role that brought her to new heights. You can almost feel the charge she’s getting from the challenge coming off of her in certain scenes, yet she’s generous to all of her co-stars, and to the show’s goals as well. The role gave her gravitas, and she in turn accepted it, and played it, but also smartly spun it on its ear. She never gets heavy-handed or self-important. She walks into every scene in Watchmen hitting the beats this complicated story needs, but finding a few beats that nobody else might have unearthed. It doesn’t even matter that she’s likely headed for Emmy number four this fall: the show feels like a massive turning point for her, where she maybe could play anything.
Reader Comments (15)
Wow this makes me really want to see this. May bite and pay for hbo
I think Blanchett is going to give her a run for the Emmy. But yes, she’s awesome on the show.
I'm a big fan of her Oscar win - but she'st still like 6th best of the decade for me. (It was a pretty great decade for that category.)
I actually think that If Beale Street Could Talk is a masterpiece, the best film of 2018 and a future classic - and that she’s great in it.
I’m more baffled that so many didn’t find her “best in class” - especially when the only other actresses in her category even on her level were both fraudulent leads (and both better than Colman in my opinion but that’s a different topic).
This is such a golden era for Regina - so many great movies in her catalogue but now she’s getting great roles too!
Regina King's performance in If Beale Street Could Talk was one of the most celebrated with the critics. Her biggest competition for an Emmy for Watchmen - will be first time nominee Cate Blanchett for Mrs. America.
The competition for that lead actress Emmy in a limited series or movie seems much too crowded now to assume a nomination for Regina King, much less a win.
Beyond Cate Blanchett in the unseen Mrs. America, there's . . .
Octavia Spencer, award magnet, solid in the Netflix four parter, Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C. J. Walker
Emmy darling Merritt Wever doing some of her best work in Unbelievable as well as ingenue Kaitlyn Dever, stunning in the series as well
Emmy, Tony, and Grammy winner Cynthia Erivo playing the late Aretha Franklin in the National Geographic series Genius which has reaped Emmy attention in earlier seasons
Oscar winner Reese Witherspoon is outstanding in Little Fires Everywhere while co-star Kerry Washington is strong in the Hulu series as well
Recent Emmy winner Nicole Kidman has HBO's The Undoing
And finally ten time Emmy nominee (four wins) Dame Helen Mirren should not be discounted for Catherine the Great
She is quite simply the greatest character actress of her generation.
Tim Blake Nelson. Before 2018, I thought he was one of...those. An eternal C-lister, even as a character actor. And THEN Buster Scruggs happened. Yeah, I don't think that anymore. He's too gangly and weird to be Clooney or Depp, sure, but THAT is what "Potential A-list character actor" looks like.
Good actress but her unjust Oscar win and multiple Emmys almost make her overrated
I think she will take the Amy Adams route, crazy ass hype but losing the Emmy
I think she deserved her Oscar and she's more than deserving of an Emmy nomination for her work on Watchmen. I wonder if the show may be *too* fantastic for the voting body, though? And, as has already been noted, there's gonna be a lot of stiff competition in her category this year and her potential competitors (Blanchett, Spencer, and Kidman to name a few) are just as beloved in the acting community as she is. Of course, I'd be over-the-moon if her work was acknowledged.
She was eligible for this performance at SAG and the Globes last year and they didn't bite. I'm sure she'll secure placement as a nominee but Blanchett has the win in the bag.
Is anyone begging for a movie about Phyllis Schlafly though? Nothing is in the bag at this point.
Streep and Moore won accolades for playing conservative women. People see it as a challenge for actors who don't share their character's politics and make widely known women who are disagreeable as hell somewhat sympathetic usually does the trick.
/3rtful: Except those were also as, respectively, an extremely and moderately successful actual conservative POLITICIAN. Schlafly was just an activist. A regressive activist, but still just an activist. To put it another, even handed, way: If Greta Thunberg never gets elected to anything, would an actor ever get Oscar or Emmy heat for playing her?