Lena Waithe
Lena Waithe is an actor, born 1984.
The writing is the part that won. Lena Waithe took the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series for the "Thanksgiving" episode of Master of None, an episode drawn from her own experience of coming out to her mother, on a show where she also plays Denise. Writing an award-winning episode about yourself and then performing it is a hard trick and she made it look ordinary.
From there she built as a creator. The Chi, her Showtime drama, started in 2018 and is still running. Boomerang followed on BET from 2019 to 2020 and Twenties from 2020 to 2021. She wrote and produced the crime film Queen & Slim in 2019 and executive produced the horror anthology Them from 2021. She is from Chicago, and the creator credits have stayed noticeably closer to home than the acting ones.
That acting work runs on a different track and is worth being clear about: it is mostly supporting, mostly comic, and mostly other people's projects. Aech in Ready Player One is the biggest of them. Officer Spector in Onward is a voice part. P. Ninny on Dear White People and Brook-Lynne in Bad Hair are supporting. She is a good screen presence, relaxed and quick, but nobody has yet written her a lead to match what she writes for other people.
The rest of the record is documentary and hosting: Amend: The Fight for America, narrating Visible: Out on Television, The Shop, Hollywood Black.
Movies (5)
TV (9)
Where to start with Lena Waithe
Read her as a writer before you watch her as an actor, or you will get the wrong idea about what she does.
That means Master of None first, and specifically the "Thanksgiving" episode, the one that won the Emmy for comedy writing. It is the clearest statement of intent in her catalogue, and she is very good in it as well as behind it.
The Chi is the follow-through, the show where she is the creator rather than the performer, and it is the one to judge her ambition by. Give it a few episodes: it is built as an ensemble portrait rather than a plot engine.
For the acting, Ready Player One is the widest sample and Bad Hair the more interesting, a smaller and much stranger film that gives her something with more bite than a studio blockbuster can. Onward and Dear White People are brief but characteristic.
Visible: Out on Television is the one to save for a quiet evening. She narrates it, and the subject sits directly on top of everything else on this page.