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.
