Regina King

Regina Rene King (born January 15, 1971) is an American actress, director and producer. She has received various accolades, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and four Primetime Emmy Awards. In 2019, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

King first gained attention for starring in the television sitcom 227 (1985–1990). Her subsequent roles included the film Friday (1995), the animated series The Boondocks (2005–2014), and the crime television series Southland (2009–2013). She received four Primetime Emmy Awards for her performances in the ABC anthology series American Crime (2015–2017), the Netflix miniseries Seven Seconds, and the HBO limited series Watchmen (2019). Her other television roles include the drama series The Leftovers (2015–2017) and the sitcom The Big Bang Theory (2013–2019).

She has also played supporting roles in the drama films Boyz n the Hood (1991), Poetic Justice (1993), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), and Ray (2004), as well as in the comedies Down to Earth (2001), Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde (2003), A Cinderella Story (2004), and Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous (2005). She earned critical acclaim, as well as the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, for her role in If Beale Street Could Talk (2018). She then starred in the western The Harder They Fall (2021) and played the title role in the biopic Shirley (2024).

King has directed episodes for several television shows, including Scandal in 2015 and 2016 and This Is Us in 2017. She has also directed the music video for the 2010 song "Finding My Way Back" by Jaheim. King's feature film directorial debut came with the drama One Night in Miami... (2020), which earned her a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Director.

What those lines don't quite capture is the arc: this is one of the great American acting careers, built role by role across four decades. King started at fifteen as Brenda Jenkins on the sitcom 227, and spent the nineties becoming John Singleton's essential supporting player — Shalika in Boyz n the Hood (1991), Iesha in Poetic Justice (1993), then Dana in Friday (1995), the girlfriend who anchors Ice Cube's Craig. She could do the comedies too — Jerry Maguire's Marcee Tidwell is the film's conscience, the one who tells Cuba Gooding Jr.'s Rod exactly what she thinks. By the 2000s she was everywhere and excellent: Ray (2004) as Margie Hendrix, the voice of both Huey and Riley Freeman on The Boondocks (2005–2014), the only performer who could carry that show's double duty.

The prestige run started with Southland (2009–2013), where her Detective Lydia Adams — the show's emotional center — earned her two Emmy nominations and proved what people in the industry already knew: give Regina King the dramatic lead and she will carry the whole series. Then came the historic part. She won the Emmy for American Crime twice — 2015 and 2016 — playing entirely different characters in different seasons, the first actress to win back-to-back Emmys for the same anthology series. She won again for Seven Seconds (2018), playing a grieving mother with a stillness that made the courtroom scenes feel unbearable. And then Watchmen (2019): Sister Night, the masked Tulsa detective, the lead of HBO's most ambitious limited series — her fourth Emmy, for four different shows. Nobody does that by accident.

If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) was the Oscar — Sharon Rivers, the mother who flies to Puerto Rico to beg for her daughter's fiancé's freedom. Barry Jenkins gives her the film's centerpiece, a single unbroken close-up where she does nothing but listen, and she makes it the most devastating scene of the year. The Academy, the Golden Globes, and the critics all agreed. And behind the camera, she was quietly becoming one of television's most in-demand directors — Scandal, This Is Us, Insecure, Shameless, The Good Doctor, Animal Kingdom, Pitch, Greenleaf, Being Mary Jane — before One Night in Miami... (2020) made it official: the first film directed by an African-American woman ever selected at the Venice Film Festival, a Golden Globe directing nomination, the Robert Altman Award at the Independent Spirits.

She hasn't slowed down in front of the camera either: the scene-stealing Trudy Smith in The Harder They Fall (2021), the title role in Shirley (2024) as Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, and Detective Roman in Darren Aronofsky's Caught Stealing (2025). In January 2022 she endured the loss of her son Ian, and she's spoken about grief with a candor that has resonated far beyond Hollywood. Through all of it — the child actor years, the ensemble years, the awards avalanche, the directing career — Regina King has done the rarest thing in this business: she's gotten better every decade. Time put her on the 100 most influential list in 2019. The industry put her behind the camera. The audience just keeps watching.

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Regina King has been excellent for so long that the industry finally ran out of ways to ignore it. From 227 (1985) to Boyz n the Hood (1991) to Jerry Maguire (1996), she was the reliable best thing in every frame — and then the awards caught up all at once.

American Crime brought back-to-back Emmys (2015, 2016). Seven Seconds brought another. If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) brought the Oscar — for Sharon Rivers, a performance of such maternal ferocity it rewrote the film's ending in the audience's memory. Watchmen (2019) brought the fourth Emmy and the definitive prestige-TV heroine.

Then she directed One Night in Miami (2020), announcing a filmmaker's career to match the actor's. Regina King doesn't do comebacks. She does coronations — and she's had several.