Regina King Breaks Through (Again) With One Night in Miami, Her Directorial Debut

King hasn’t sought out law-enforcement roles, but excels in them, playing cops who are stoical on the outside even as they struggle with the racism they know lurks in the ranks. She says she learned a lot about the psychology of police officers by working with a retired officer named Sheila Daniel.

“Prior to Southland, my relationship with law enforcement was not one of trust,” she says. “Spending so much time with her, she really made me understand how someone could love a job that puts them in harm’s way… Sheila wasn’t Black, but she definitely was very sensitive to the relationship between Black people and law enforcement. And it made me understand the passion that a police officer can have.

“So I really was able to appreciate law enforcement on a level that I would have never thought. If you would have asked me that in 1990, I would have been like, ‘F that, heck no, a police officer doesn’t have my best interest at heart.’ And you can see, now that the cell phone videos are out, why Black communities feel that way.”

2018’s If Beale Street Could Talk shows the consequences of racist policing. King plays a woman who gets evidence of her own when a loved one is set up for a crime he didn’t commit. And in Watchmen, King pulls off a dizzying role as a superhero/ cop who discovers that racism goes deeper, and strikes closer to home, than she ever imagined.

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Movies, even fictionalized movies, have become one of the ways we learn truths — sometimes through Hollywood mythmaking, and sometimes by trying to learn the facts behind it. One Night in Miami doesn’t claim to tell the literal truth. But it does let us understand viewpoints we might not otherwise, and see that we’re all driven by the same vulnerabilities, fears and hopes.

“The way our history has been written in America, it’s been revised so much, for so many years, that there’s a large group of people in America that when the George Floyd incident happened, the murder happened, they had never seen that,” King says.

She notes that the camera recorded not only Floyd, but the face of the officer who killed him.

“So now, someone had a camera on that man. And not only do they have it on the man, it was a close-up, so you can see the disregard for life in his eyes. And so when you talk to a Black person who has seen that face before, many times, in different forms… you can actually have empathy.”

Love

Regina King directed episodes of Southland, Being Mary Jane, and other shows, and when she wanted to direct a feature film, her agent asked her what kinds of projects to pursue.

“I gave him a few different stories that I’d be interested in telling,” she recalls. “One of them was that I wanted to tell a love story with a historical backdrop. And so a couple weeks later, he sent me One Night in Miami. And I was like, ‘Wow. He’s a great listener.’

“Because when I was saying that, I was meaning it more in the traditional sense of love story. But this film is still a love story, in my regard, in my opinion. That’s how I received it when I read the script. That’s how I still received it, when I read the play.”

As Malcolm X, Kingsley Ben-Adir shows more vulnerability than we’re used to seeing in X’s cinematic portrayals. He isn’t just the passionate orator we’ve seen calling out white hypocrisy: He worries about being accused of hypocrisy himself. His faith in his leader, Elijah Muhammad, has been shaken.

Clay hasn’t yet joined Malcolm X in converting to Islam or taken the name Muhammad Ali. They both know the conversion will be momentous. But Malcolm is asking the young boxer to join a cause he knows is imperfect.

“Regina’s understanding of the acting process allowed for such a fluid and creative set,” says Ben-Adir. “Her empathy, calmness and consistency meant that we could play and really discover. I’ve never had that before.”

Eli Goree’s version of young Clay isn’t yet the ebulliently confident Greatest Fighter of All Time. He’s malleable, looking for purpose. Football star Jim Brown, meanwhile, played by Aldis Hodge, is supremely capable, and understandably cynical. And Leslie Odom Jr.’s sweet-voiced Sam Cooke, perceived by some as making nice with the white mainstream, is walking a more complicated path than almost anyone understands.

“We’ve seen Malcolm X portrayed more than any of the other icons. And I really felt like this was a Malcolm X that I truly had never seen before,” says King. “This Malcolm reminded me that he was a husband, reminded me of how much he was sacrificing, reminded me of how much he had to lose. But yet, he still believed that this was what he was put on earth to do — to lead.”

She adds: “You don’t get the opportunity to consider that Jim could be an introspective person. A person that just can listen and take everything in. And when he does say something, it is something.”

One Night in Miami takes you inside a freewheeling discussion that tests all of their strengths and vulnerabilities.

“We are having an opportunity to be a fly on the wall during a really private conversation, and those private conversations, the reason why they’re usually private, is because the people that are engaging in the conversation usually have to shed their mask,” she says. “Usually they have to shed those things that we put up to protect ourselves every day, that we have to put up to protect ourselves every day. And whenever you get down to the nitty-gritty, you know, you’re kind of out there naked, because you’re being honest about the things that are maybe the things that you don’t think are the best qualities about yourself.”

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But these uncomfortable conversations are where change happens, she says.

“Any of us that have had the opportunity to find ourselves in these conversations, we realized by the end… this is a breakthrough moment,” she says. “Because it’s one thing, having the conversation amongst people that have had the same experience. It’s another thing having conversations with people who’ve had a different experience, and coming together, or agreeing that yes, your experience is different than mine. And yours is valid.”

One Night in Miami, directed by Regina King, is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video . Photos by Patti Perret. 

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