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      Moses Ingram Knows You Wanted to See More Jolene

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      The “Queen’s Gambit” actress was nominated for her first Emmy this year. It was her first major role out of drama school.Voting is underway for the 73rd Primetime Emmys, and this week we’re talking to several first-time Emmy nominees. The awards will be presented Sept. 19 on CBS.Moses Ingram realized how big “The Queen’s Gambit” was going to be when somebody tattooed her face on their body. Netflix released the series on Oct. 23, and by around November, a Brazilian man had sent Ingram a picture of his new tattoo.“I mean, I know it’s not about me; it’s more about Jolene,” Ingram said. “But it’s still my face. So it was like, ‘I’m happy you’re happy with it?’”Ingram plays Jolene, a rebellious teenager at the Methuen Home, an orphanage for girls, who becomes the closest childhood friend of the protagonist, Beth Harmon (played by, at different ages, Annabeth Kelly, Isla Johnston and Anya Taylor-Joy). The performance earned Ingram an Emmy nomination for outstanding supporting actress in a limited or anthology series or movie, her first nomination for a major award.She said she was shocked when she got the call about the nomination. She wasn’t watching the Emmys announcement, nor did she know it was happening that day. She was just on her way to work.Her reaction was perhaps best captured in her Instagram post from that day: a throwback photo of Ingram as a child, looking absolutely flabbergasted, with the caption, “They said I’m what 🤯.”Ingram attended Baltimore School for the Arts, and class trips to local productions of plays like “A Raisin in the Sun” showed her that acting could be a career. After earning an associate degree at Baltimore City Community College, she attended Yale School of Drama. She auditioned for the role of Jolene fresh out of drama school.While viewers were drawn to the character, many wanted more of her — and more nuanced story lines. Some critics viewed Jolene as veering “dangerously into ‘guardian angel’ and ‘magical Negro’ trope territory,” referring to Black characters whose only apparent purpose is to aid and enlighten white protagonists.A monologue in the last episode seemed to anticipate this criticism. As Jolene offers to loan Beth the $3,000 she needs to travel to a chess tournament in Moscow, she explains: “I’m not your guardian angel. I’m not here to save you. Hell, I can barely save me. I’m here because you need me to be here. It’s what family does. That’s what we are.” But some viewers still saw a Black woman given too little screen time and not enough character development.Ingram has stayed busy since the release of “The Queen’s Gambit,” scoring roles in Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” (debuting at the New York Film Festival this fall), the Michael Bay-directed action thriller “Ambulance” and the “Star Wars” mini-series “Obi-Wan Kenobi.”Speaking on her way to the “Obi-Wan Kenobi” set in Los Angeles, Ingram discussed her first love, her first audition and her first major role. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.You have said that plays like “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Hurt Village” made a strong impression on you in high school because they made “the hood beautiful.” Did they change your view of acting and drama?Definitely, because I had never seen plays. It wasn’t something that was normal to me until I went to a school that made it a point for us to go and see live performances.And up until that point, everything I had seen was white people. It was like “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and Tennessee Williams and all of those kinds of things. So seeing people that looked like me, just looking like they were just living onstage — I didn’t even know.I mean, I knew I liked acting, but I didn’t really know it was a possibility until I was like: “Oh, people really do this! I could do this.”How was the transition from Baltimore City Community College to Yale? Did you feel any impostor syndrome?Absolutely. For the longest time, I walked around just sort of like, — I don’t know, I just felt like I had to work super hard. And I think I put more stress on myself than I needed to because I felt like I had to prove my worthiness of being there. Like, anything I was offered, I had to do because I had to be grateful.So I spent a lot of time that first year — and second year, honestly — just very drained. Because I was pushing way harder than I needed to. But I also had fun, so it wasn’t all bad.“The Queen’s Gambit” was your first audition after drama school. How did it feel to find success so quickly after such a hard road to get there?I felt really blessed, and I felt really relieved. Obviously, I had no idea what the show was going to do. I was just really happy to have a job and to be working, and to get to go to Germany on top of all of that. It felt nice to not have to worry because I spent a lot of time worrying about going backward, back to where I was before. So it really freed my mind up some, for a little while.The early part of the show is set in Kentucky, and Jolene has a very distinctive voice — literally and figuratively. Did you have any models or study anything to make it sound more authentic?One of the main things our vocal coach wanted to push, at least for me, was opening up the vowels more. But it wasn’t something I had to think super hard about because my natural tendency draws south. So she just wanted to take it from south to west.Unlike Beth, Jolene is played by the same actress from start to finish. What did you do to reflect her advancing age?I think especially with young Jolene, it was more about the freedom: freedom of what you say and your mouth and how you think. Really just unrestricted. And then also freedom in the body, just loose.Having no real structure, you’re hunching, you’re leaning, and you don’t really know what it’s like to be really in your body yet. So I think the main distinction going into adult Jolene was really solidly and firmly being in that body and confidently being woman.Unlike the character Beth, who was portrayed by three different actors, Jolene was played by Ingram throughout the series.NetflixDo you see any of yourself in Jolene?If anything I probably see myself more in young Jolene. At least at a period in my life. Just sort of rough around the edges. And, like, even if your way of doing things does not seem like it’s the best way to other people, it’s like: “Well, it’s my way, and it’s working for me now, and I’m going to let it work until it doesn’t. And that’s going to have to be fine.” I think, at a point in time, I very much was that younger version. I think I’m still working toward older Jolene’s pizazz.People have very mixed feelings about Jolene. You’ve acknowledged in previous interviews that she is a supporting character while also saying that we still need more stories where actors of color aren’t just supporting. Have you found that in any of the current projects you’ve been working on?It’s hard for people to accept that Jolene is a supporting character, I think because she is Black. If Jolene was white, I do not think it would be as much of a talking point. I think because of the story that my skin tells, there just naturally has to be an extra layer of care around storytelling, and what certain things look like. Optics play a huge role because when I walk into things, there are just certain realities.This is not me saying that supporting characters are not appropriate for people who look like me. That’s not what I’m saying. But the point — which with time I’ve been able to articulate better because I’ve been just watching that whole thing unfold — is that there has to be extra care around storytelling with Black bodies.Since leaving drama school, it’s been one series or movie after another for you. Do you plan to return to theater at some point?It’s absolutely my first love. And when I started, it was my only intention. It wasn’t until I got to school that I was like, “Oh, there are more” — I mean, obviously, I watched TV but my way in, before going to school, was theater.So I love the theater. It’s my first home, and I hope to get back to it sooner than later. I don’t want to get too far away from it. I think I’ll get scared if I wait too long. More

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      Ashley Nicole Black Is Competing Against Herself for an Emmy

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      The comedian was nominated twice in the same Emmy category for her television writing. She’s just getting started.At first, Ashley Nicole Black didn’t get why people kept sending her the meme of Spider-Man pointing at an identical Spider-Man, an image often used to joke about situations in which two incredibly similar people face off.But when someone Photoshopped Ms. Black’s face onto both Spider-Mans, it clicked. The 2021 Emmy Awards nominations had just been announced, and Ms. Black, 36, had been nominated twice in the same category.She was competing against herself.Ms. Black was nominated for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series for “The Amber Ruffin Show” and “A Black Lady Sketch Show.” Two other people have been nominated twice in this category in the past five years: John Mulaney and Seth Meyers, both in 2019.I CANT WITH YALL 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 https://t.co/YE7gBnqjw0— Ashley Nicole Black (@ashleyn1cole) July 14, 2021
      “I feel like that kid still, who’s on the side of the playground, who nobody’s noticed,” Ms. Black said in a recent video interview. But that’s just impostor syndrome talking. Ms. Black has been nominated for an Emmy eight times: twice for writing for a variety special and six times for writing for a variety series. She also won once, in 2017, for her work on “Not the White House Correspondents Dinner” with Samantha Bee.Ms. Black has written for many critically acclaimed series and shows, including “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee,” “Ted Lasso” and “Bless This Mess.” Although “A Black Lady Sketch Show” is Ms. Black’s first time as a series regular, she was a correspondent on “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee” and acted in “Drunk History” and the 2014 film “An American Education.”Robin Thede, the creator of “A Black Lady Sketch Show” on HBO — which was also nominated this year as an Outstanding Variety Sketch Series, and twice for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series (Yvette Nicole Brown and Issa Rae) — sees Ms. Black as “a force of nature and of comedy.”“I have been lucky enough to work with her as a writer and performer and know firsthand how ridiculously good she is at both,” Ms. Thede wrote in an email. “She’s truly a powerhouse who will leave an indelible mark on this industry.”Ms. Black described herself as “someone who’s observing what’s going on in the world, and trying to reflect it back to people.” “To me,” she said, “that’s art.”She is from a family of musicians, so singing in an ensemble, she said — whether it was musical theater or show choir — meant learning to breathe with others and sound like one voice. This set her up for the moment she found improv comedy, because she already knew how to collaborate — and how not to steal a scene. “I was, I think, picking up all the pieces I needed to get where I was going,” she said.After graduating from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2007, she began a Ph.D. program in performance studies at Northwestern University. She hated it and was anxious all the time, she said, so her parents bought her an improv class at the Second City comedy club in nearby Chicago to blow off steam.When she took a comedy writing class there, a teacher pulled her aside to let her know she was a writer.“People had been telling me, ‘You should try this. You should try this,’ and I had been uncomfortably trying it,” Ms. Black said. “But ‘you’re a writer’? I was like, ‘yes.’ I completely shifted my view of myself to be a writer first. And that was when everything started to fall into place.”Chicago, Ms. Black said, is the best place in the world to learn comedy writing. There’s an “emotionality” she found in Chicago that she values in many of her collaborators, including Ms. Bee and Ms. Ruffin.“What attracted me to Sam and Amber is that they’re admitting to you that they live in the world,” she said. “And they might be upset about it, and they might be angry about it, and they might cry about it on camera, because they’re not removed from it. They’re a part of it.”This is the “good stuff” of comedy, in Ms. Black’s eyes: The stuff that happens when characters have feelings, and when they’re flawed. People who have been to therapy and have their lives together aren’t nearly as fun to embody, she said. A good example of a character who embodies that tension: Ashley’s perfectionistic alter ego on “A Black Lady Sketch Show.”In the show, Ms. Black plays a woman (also named Ashley) who is a bossy know-it-all. She is trying for total control, and in the process, irritating her friends. “I am not like that and take great pains not to be,” Ms. Black said, “but it’s so much fun to play.”“All day, you have anxiety. You’re trying to make sure everyone around you is comfortable,” she said of real life. “You’re thinking about what you say and what you do and how it affects people. And then, when you get to play those characters who aren’t that way, it’s so freeing.”Ms. Black said she tends to be quiet and a little shy, and that she used to worry that not being “on” all the time might disappoint people. “But I’ve sort of released feeling bad about that,” she said, “because I just try to be present and have honest experiences.”During the pandemic, those experiences included spending time with her family in Los Angeles, being a hardworking dog mom to Gordi the Sato and watching every Marvel movie ever made. “I just wanted to watch good guys win some things,” she said.Right now she’s evaluating what she wants to do next and what percentage of her time she wants to spend on each thing. Ms. Ruffin wrote in an email about Ms. Black, “she’s gone from ‘a writer’ to ‘theeeee writer.’” But Ms. Black is still hoping for a 70-30 or 60-40 writing to acting split, she said.For now, “It really made me so happy that people — oh my gosh, I’m getting emotional — care what I’m doing,” she said. “So I’m just really grateful that anybody noticed that I was working so hard.” More

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      in Music

      Elliot Lawrence, Award-Winning Conductor, Dies at 96

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      He led a big band, conducted on Broadway, collected Emmys and for nearly 50 years led the orchestra on the annual Tony Awards broadcast.Elliot Lawrence, who after leading a big band in the 1940s and ’50s won a Tony Award for his conducting on Broadway and spent nearly a half-century in charge of the orchestra that plays on the Tonys’ annual broadcast, died on July 2 in Manhattan. He was 96.His son Jamie confirmed the death, at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.A pianist by training, Mr. Lawrence was a leader from a young age, forming one youth ensemble, the Band Busters, at age 12. In his 20s he started Elliot Lawrence and His Orchestra, which was voted the most promising new big band in Billboard’s college polls in 1947 and 1948.His later work as conductor of the Tony Awards orchestra — a job he got because of his success on Broadway and in television — earned him two Emmy Awards.“He was happiest in front of an orchestra,” said Jamie Lawrence, who is also a musician and conductor.The big-band era was waning after World War II, but Mr. Lawrence’s orchestra found success playing colleges, proms and concerts. In 1949 alone, it traveled 65,000 miles.The band’s members variously included the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, who wrote some of its arrangements, and the trumpeter Red Rodney. It performed at the Paramount Theater in Manhattan and at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles.“He knew how to rehearse, and he had great ears,” Joe Soldo, who played saxophone for Mr. Lawrence’s band from 1949 to 1951, said by phone. “He had instrumentation, like a separate oboe and a French horn. He brought classical input to his arrangements.”But Mr. Lawrence decided to stop touring in 1954 after a trombone player in his band, Ollie Wilson, had given him bad news about some of the other musicians.“He came to me one night on the road and said, ‘El, I’m sorry to tell you this, but out of the 16 guys in the band, 14 of them were junkies.’ Only Ollie and I were clean,” Mr. Lawrence recalled in 2009 in an interview with the alumni magazine of his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania.He occasionally reassembled the band in various configurations to record albums, including “Elliot Lawrence Plays Gerry Mulligan Arrangements” (1955), “Swinging at the Steel Pier” (1956) and “Jazz Goes Broadway” (1957).By then he had begun to find work in television. In 1959, he conducted a 42-piece orchestra that the television host Ed Sullivan took to the Soviet Union.While there, one of the many performers on the trip, the choreographer Gower Champion, asked Mr. Lawrence to be the musical director of “Bye Bye Birdie,” which Mr. Champion was directing and which was to open on Broadway the next year.Mr. Lawrence was conducting the “Bye Bye Birdie” orchestra — on his way to a Tony nomination — when the composer Frank Loesser hired him for the same job on his new musical, “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” which opened in October 1961.Their collaboration proved fruitful. Mr. Lawrence won a Tony, one of seven that the show received, including best musical and best actor (Robert Morse).Mr. Lawrence, at the piano, in 1946. He found success leading several bands, including Elliot Lawrence and His Orchestra.CBS RadioElliot Lawrence Broza was born on Feb. 14, 1925, in Philadelphia. His father, Stan Lee Broza, was a founder and executive of the local radio station WCAU. He and Elliot’s mother, Esther (Malis) Broza, produced the long-running variety show “The Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour” on radio and later on television.Elliot began taking piano lessons at age 3. In 1930 he contracted polio, which affected his fingers and neck, but he recovered and began playing again, and at 10 he was accompanying his mother when she sang tunes from the Great American Songbook at parties in their home.He went on to perform with the Band Busters on his parents’ “Children’s Hour.” At 16 he entered the University of Pennsylvania on a music scholarship and became student director of the marching band, writing, he recalled, jazz arrangements for the school’s fight songs when the football team faced Army in a sold-out game at Franklin Field in Philadelphia.After graduating in 1944 with a bachelor’s degree in music, Mr. Lawrence took over WCAU’s house band, which played live on the air. He formed his big band a year later. Around that time he changed his surname to Lawrence and made Broza his middle name.In 1949, as a veteran bandleader of 24, he was focused on the music as well as the business of overseeing a touring group of 17 members, including two singers, that was grossing $300,000 a year but losing money nevertheless because of salaries, transportation, uniforms, booking agency fees and other costs.“You can see it isn’t a way to get rich quick,” Mr. Lawrence told The Kansas City Star, adding: “My father is my business manager. I don’t have to worry about my money being stolen.”The big-band work yielded to conducting on Broadway, where, after “How to Succeed,” he was the musical director of eight more shows, including “1776,” which opened in 1969. By then he was a year into his run as conductor of the Tony Awards orchestra, a gig that would last until 2013.In addition to the Emmys he won for his work on the Tonys, Mr. Lawrence also won Emmys for his musical direction of the television specials “’S Wonderful, ’S Marvelous, ’S Gershwin,” a tribute to George and Ira Gershwin in 1972, and “Night of 100 Stars” (1982), an all-star variety show celebrating the centennial of the Actors’ Fund of America.His television credits include writing music for soap operas like “The Edge of Night,” for which he won two Daytime Emmys, and two ABC Afterschool Specials, which earned him two more Daytime Emmys.He also wrote music for the opening sequence of “The French Connection” (1971) and for “Network” (1976). But most of his “Network” score was cut, Jamie Lawrence said.“Paddy Chayefsky came into the edit room and said, ‘I don’t want to hear music,’” Mr. Lawrence said, referring to the film’s screenwriter. “He only wanted dialogue.”“My dad,” he added, “was very proud of that score.”In addition to his son Jamie, Mr. Lawrence is survived by his daughters, Alexandra and Mia Lawrence; another son, Danny; and five grandchildren. His wife, Amy (Bunim) Lawrence, died in 2017.Ricky Kirschner, the executive producer of the Tonys broadcast, recalled Mr. Lawrence as a gentlemanly leader of the orchestra until he was nearly 90.“Think about it,” he said by phone. “It’s a three-hour show, with 15 performances, and you have to arrange and rehearse music for every possible winner. And when they say who the winner is, you have to be fast enough to play it while the director is in your ear, telling you to cut after 20 or 30 seconds”He added, “Think of doing that when you’re 88.” More

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      in Television

      Cynthia Erivo of ‘Genius: Aretha,’ on Playing the Queen of Soul

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      The Tony and Grammy Award winner was nominated for an Emmy for her portrayal of Aretha Franklin in the National Geographic series.When Cynthia Erivo was little, it seemed to her Aretha Franklin was on the radio all the time. She remembers the name of the radio station (Magic FM) and the exact songs that seemed to be on infinite repeat: “Chain of Fools”; “Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves”; “I Knew You Were Waiting”; and “Until You Come Back to Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do).” More

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      in Television

      Emmys 2021: The List of Nominees

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      The 73rd annual Emmy Award nominations were announced on Tuesday.The 73rd annual Emmy Award nominations were announced on Tuesday by Ron Cephas Jones (“This Is Us”) and Jasmine Cephas Jones (#freerayshawn), a father-daughter pair who are previous Emmy winners. Netflix’s “The Crown” and the Disney+ Star Wars drama “The Mandalorian” led the way with 24 nominations each. HBO led all the networks with 130 nominations. More

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      Elizabeth Olsen on the Unexpected Challenges of ‘WandaVision’

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      Olsen talked about her first Emmy nomination and about why the series exceeded her expectations compared with more typical Marvel fare.In a year with so much strangeness and uncertainty, “WandaVision” at first seemed to offer a nostalgic antidote with its tidy suburban setting and its vintage black-and-white aesthetic. That lasted all of two episodes before the writers blasted a colorful hole through the protective wall of static surrounding the fictional town of Westview, N.J. — and through its viewers’ (and its critics’) early expectations. More

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      Billy Porter Believes That ‘Pose’ Blazed a Lasting Trail

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      The star was nominated again for his role as Pray Tell, M.C. of New York’s legendary drag balls, one of nine nominations the show received on Tuesday.In 2019, Billy Porter cemented his place in history as the first openly gay Black man to be nominated for — and then the first to win — a lead acting award at the Primetime Emmys. More

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      Brendan Hunt Is Still Surprised ‘Ted Lasso’ Is So Popular

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      The actor, writer and creator, who earned four Emmy nods for his work on Season 1, talked about the unexpected success of the most nominated freshman comedy in history.“Ted Lasso,” the Apple TV+ series about a clueless Kansas football coach (Jason Sudeikis) hired to be the manager of a struggling London Premier League soccer team — despite (or, rather, because of) his utter lack of soccer knowledge — is in itself an underdog story. The critical reception when the first episodes premiered last summer was tepid, to put it kindly. More