Story by Stereo Williams
Images by DeWayne Rogers
Styled by Tuesdai Winn
MakeUp by Dre Brown
The audience at Rockwood Music Hall on New York’s Lower East Side is practically buzzing. The crowd includes everyone from music critics to rapper-actor Common. And they’re all here to get a glimpse of Margot Bingham, the sultry actress, singer and model. She takes the stage shortly after 9 p.m., all sass and sex appeal. “Y’all know this ain’t ‘Boardwalk Empire,’ right?” she says, with a charming smile. She proceeds to launch into her set of smoky originals and swinging covers (including a stirring rendition of Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun”), and she has the confidence and charisma of a woman who knew all along that she would be a star.
All she needed was “the call.”
“The call” is that momentous ring of the telephone that signifies that an actor has landed the part of a lifetime. That career-changing call. For Margot Bingham, that call was to inform her that she’d landed the role of Daughter Maitland on HBO’s acclaimed period drama “Boardwalk Empire.” For the radiant Pittsburgh native, it was the culmination of years of hard work and immutable expectations. She was understandably ecstatic.
So ecstatic, in fact, that she didn’t notice someone robbing her.
“The day I got the call, I got pickpocketed,” she recalls, smiling at the memory. “I was on the train platform and I was so excited! And I was wearing this big jacket with big pockets and wasn’t paying attention. Someone came up and said ‘Great jacket!’ and I said ‘Thank you, that’s so nice of you!’ And I got on the train and went to take my phone out and it was gone. I guess she really liked my jacket, but liked my phone better.”
