Regina King Assumed That Her Chances of Winning an Emmy Were "So Small"
Speaking to press backstage after picking up the award for lead actress in a limited series for Netflix show Seven Seconds, King said she’d assumed she couldn’t be the winner, because life has taught her that, as a woman of color, she’ll be outnumbered at awards shows.
“I do feel a lot of times we’re just so divided as a country,” she said, “and that things are always looked at as black or white. I am guilty of that a lot of times as well, and I think that probably played into a big part of my assumption that the chances of me winning were so small.”
But the lack of diversity in awards nominations is a still very, very real issue, she pointed out.
“Looking at the numbers of different people in the category,” she said, “the numbers do definitely weigh larger on the white population...that was one of the moments that was really sitting with me on that stage.”
But through King’s shock at winning, she took heart from the fact that more kinds of stories are now being heard and nominated and winning awards.
“This is the Television Academy,” she said. “The academy of my peers don’t just have the same skin color as me, and they’re not just only interested in things that represent what they look like. They’re interested in storytelling, and they’re interested in seeing things from a different perspective.”
The actress, who first became seriously famous for her roles in the films Friday and Jerry Maguire, said her win on Monday “is an example of us thinking more globally, and not thinking in a box,” but that she also realized she’d been constricted in her own view of herself. “This was a moment for me to recognize that sometimes [even] when I think that I’m not, I am thinking in a box myself-so this was a surprise.”
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