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Regina King on learning to live with loss, the legacy of Shirley Chisholm, and finding a way forward...“One of the things I’ve learned on this journey is that gratitude and sadness are not mutually exclusive.”

The actor and director opens up about the tragic death of her son, her new film about Shirley Chisholm, and finding a way forward

The film, directed by Oscar-winning screenwriter John Ridley, tells the story of Shirley Chisholm, who, in 1968, became the first Black woman elected to Congress—and four years later, launched a historic bid for the Democratic Party nomination for president. In 2019, while promoting Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk, the plot of which hinged on a young Black man who is accused of a crime he didn’t commit, she recalled how Ian told her after a screening of the film that it was the first time he’d ever watched a movie and felt seen. When I spoke with King in early 2021 about her feature directorial debut, One Night in Miami…, a fictionalized account of an actual meeting in 1964 between world heavyweight-champion boxer Muhammad Ali, football star Jim Brown, Civil Rights leader Malcolm X, and soul singer Sam Cooke, she told me that Ian had been a major impetus for her to want to make a film that explored Black male vulnerability through the eyes of four larger-than-life icons.

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