What Lena Waithe Wants From Hollywood
“I don’t want life to be hard for you,” a mother, played by Angela Bassett, says to her daughter Denise after learning her child is gay in the Master of None episode, “Thanksgiving.” “It is hard enough being a black woman in this world. Now you want to add something else to that?” Lena Waithe, who plays Denise, read for the role when the character was supposed to be a straight childhood friend to the main character, Dev (Aziz Ansari). Soon after casting Waithe, though, the co-creators Ansari and Alan Yang ditched the character’s background for one based on some of her real-life experiences.
That decision—to have Denise reflect Waithe’s identity as a queer black woman—led to Waithe being asked to co-write “Thanksgiving,” which went on to become one of Master of None’s most praised storylines. Thanks to her work on the episode, Waithe is up for an Emmy Award for comedy writing on September 17; she’s also the first black woman ever to be nominated in the category. Based largely on her own experiences, “Thanksgiving” chronicles Denise’s life over decades of holiday dinners, where she evolves from a tomboyish teenager in the ’90s to a woman coming out to her mother and dealing with familial growing pains as she brings a series of girlfriends home.
The Emmy nomination is just the beginning of what looks to be a busy year for Waithe, who previously worked on shows such as and films such. Following her performance on the second season of , Waithe is now producing her own drama series on Showtime, , about a handful of black men on the South Side of Chicago, where she’s from, and developing a pilot about her experience living in Los Angeles in her 20s. She’ll also appear in Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of which is set to premiere in March 2018.
