Regina Is the King of Artistic Reinvention

PASADENA, CALIF. You don’t initially envision the angelic Regina King, star of the explosive NBC show “Southland,” playing a caustic cop with a personality as sharp as porcupine needles. Not with the way she sashays into the foyer of the grandiose Langham Hotel, her athletic form poured into an elegant dress that hugs and highlights her hourglass physique. Her trimmed tresses perfectly frame her symmetrical visage, and the expression in her hypnotic eyes is as soft as velvet and as calming as a Southern California sunset.

WHY REGINA IS QUEEN:
King has carved out an enviable and illustrious career over her 20 years in a business known for devouring its own. As well as anyone in the game today, King is extremely adept at transforming herself in each character that she has played, effortlessly pulling viewers into her characters’ worlds. And King has done so with such believability that we actually see her as the character she is currently portraying.

We first became enamored with the feathery-coifed dimpled teen in the ‘80s sitcom “227.” We believed she was a ride-or-die chick in the John Singleton classic, Boyz N the Hood. And didn’t you want to knuckle up alongside King and help her reduce Joe Torre to piles of lumps after he savagely slapped her face in Poetic Justice? Tell me you didn’t want to charge into that frat house with her and Ice Cube and tear the limbs off the guy who called King a racial epithet in Higher Learning? Remember how King brought the audience to tears when she panicked as her football-playing husband (Cuba Gooding Jr.) lay motionless in the end zone in Jerry Maguire? And we won’t soon forget her award-winning performance as the salacious temptress, lover and backup singer in the Oscar-winning biopic, Ray.

But there’s something else at play here. In addition to the transformative component of King’s artistic arsenal, there seems to be a singular, powerful undercurrent woven through every one of King’s characters — undeniable strength. “A lot of the characters I play are strong women,” King says. “I think that a lot of [fans] out there like to see strong women because a lot of you out there are strong women. So, once again, [here’s] another strong woman who is carrying a lot of emotional weight like a lot of women that you know.”

WIDESPREAD ADMIRATION:
King’s ability to imbue utter believability and humanity into her characters has engendered admiration throughout the industry, particularly among her peers. “I love Regina King as a brilliant actress. But, more importantly, as my dear friend,” raves Academy Award-nominated actress Taraji P. Henson. “Regina brings strength, heart and beauty to ‘Southland’ and I am so happy for her.”

“Regina has an uncanny ability to constantly reinvent herself,” adds film director Bryan Barber. “I love that she commits to each role with a sense of passion and vulnerability, which enables her to truly connect with her audience.”

THE POLITICS of HOLLYWOOD and LIFE:
Back at the Langham Hotel, which hugs the outer edge of Los Angeles, tenderness radiates from the cocoa-coated countenance of King. You can’t discern any lingering emotional scars from working, surviving and thriving in a town that so callously discards its stars and wannabe’s with equal aplomb.

“It is an unforgiving and ruthless business. Definitely — that would be a good way to put it,” King begins, but then abruptly changes her focus to Hollywood’s redeeming qualities. “But then also, it’s a wonderfully rewarding business as well. I’ve had the opportunity to move so many people with the work that I’ve done. You don’t realize how many people that you impact until you are in the grocery store or at your kid’s football game. And they say, ‘when you did this, it just brought me to tears’ or ‘it got me through my divorce’  [or] ‘when I lost my father’ or whatever it is.”

King says “Southland” gave her a newfound respect for law enforcement in general. She also came to grips with the frightening prospect of having no police presence — even temporarily.

“One of the things that we learned the first day [of] boot camp [was] what would you do if you found out that the LAPD was not working for 24 hours? And all of us were like, ‘We’d buy a gun and lock ourselves in our homes until those 24 hours were over,’ ” King recalls. “Even those of us that think [negatively] of the police department know that if something goes down, the first thing you do is dial 911.”

No need to dial 911 on King’s career because it’s hardly flat-lining. In addition to “Southland,” King is also respected because she doesn’t just gather up an army of pompous sounding words that float across the landscape looking for a place to land. Here, King is introspective and eloquent as she details the reasons she decided to become involved in politics for the first time in her 37 years. She quickly proffers that, while Barack Obama’s political dynamism inspired her to action, Obama’s wife helped solidify King’s opinion of the would-be president.

“Michelle Obama impressed me. I would pick up magazines … and I read this article and I was like ‘oh my God!’ I had like a girl crush on her,” she says. “She’s sooo smart, and she’s just sooo sharp. And she complements her man so well. The fact that he … looks at her as an equal — that said a lot to me about the man. Because a lot of men find a woman like her intimidating, [but] he did not feel intimidated by her. When he speaks about her, he just shines. And when she speaks about him, she just shines.”

Pensiveness suddenly washes over King’s face. She is extremely thoughtful in offering the real reason it was unacceptable to sit on the sidelines of history during this last presidential season.

“I think a lot of it was where I was at in my life when this election came up that inspired me to … participate in some way,” she says. “If not, then how can I get up and look at myself every day? How can I tell my son that ‘I love you with all my heart more than anything in this world’ and not participate in making major changes in this world?”

King has joined the Obamas in positively impacting the world around her, albeit in a different forum. She’s doing it again in “Southland.” King’s roles continue to offer hope and inspiration, in addition to strength, as was the case when she played a woman overcoming breast cancer in the Lifetime movie “Living Proof.”

“I’ve had people come to me in tears about how much it moved them. … What I got more than anything is that people felt hope by the time they finished [watching] the movie,” she says.

And this very reason, as much as any other, is why King continues to garner love and respect inside and outside the industry.