The role that completely consumed Angela Bassett: “The way she spoke took over”
Angela Bassett is one of those people born to act.
Whether as the queen of a fictional African supernation or the anxious mother of a boy growing up on the streets, her potent combination of authority and vulnerability makes her a solid choice for basically any part. Before Viola Davis made the role her own, she played DC’s Amanda Waller, one of the few things the torrid Green Lantern got right.
Her talents extend to playing real people, too, where in 1993, she starred as Tina Turner in the biopic What’s Love Got to Do with It. Her performance as the late singer was perfectly complemented by Laurence Fishburne as her husband, Ike, and told the story of her rise from nightclub singer to global icon. She was nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe for her work, one of many awards in her overflowing cabinet.
The pitfalls of playing a real person, and one so famous too, were not lost on Bassett, and in order to do the character justice, she felt she had to physically embody her, to let her own personality become secondary to the ‘Proud Mary’ singer’s.
As she explained to The New Yorker, this approach came with some unexpected consequences: “Tina’s laugh and the way she spoke took over. You so lived and breathed and began to see life through their perspective. You had to. They’re a part of you… You have to bid it farewell, and it’s hard to let it go, because you’ve enjoyed it, you survived it, you delivered, and you’re proud of that. You got an opportunity and you hit it out of left field. So it takes a moment to get back to regular you.”
This discussion came about when Bassett was asked about Austin Butler’s performance in Elvis, wherein he famously destroyed his voice while playing ‘The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ and talked in his character’s distinctive Southern drawl for ages after filming wrapped up. Bassett revealed that she too found herself behaving like Turner for about four months after she finished playing her, and while she admitted that Butler’s case of vocal imitation was extreme, she could understand where he was coming from.
The key difference between What’s Love Got to Do with It and Elvis is the status of their subjects: Turner was still alive when the movie was released, while Presley had been long dead by the time Baz Luhrmann took a crack at his story. This meant that there was absolutely zero chance of Butler meeting the person he was impersonating (unless a rhinestone-coated Ouija board was involved), while Turner, on the other hand, was heavily involved in her biopic and was vocally critical of the movie upon its release, claiming that it had misrepresented several facets of her life.
As popular as they are, biopics are fraught with potential issues at every level, where the average person might be concerned about how accurate a certain scene is, and the actors involved are literally changing everything about themselves in order to fit the bill. It’s just a little something to think about next time you sit down to watch Ray.
