“It’s a story about learning to be with yourself,” reflects Moses Ingram about “The Queen’s Gambit.” For our recent webchat, she adds, “So many of us, myself included, don’t know how to do that, to sit with yourself in the quiet and noise of your own psyche. We can add hundreds of thousands of people’s opinions about how good or not good you are. Sidebar, I don’t think we were made to have access to so many people’s opinions. I think it’s just a set-up. That story in particular is about how to cope and be with yourself.”
“The Queen’s Gambit” is a Netflix limited series that follows the rise of chess prodigy, Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy), during the Cold War. Ingram plays Jolene, Beth’s best friend from the Methuen Home orphanage. The actress explains, “They were like sisters, very much forced into the same place. Neither asked to be there. They found comfort and solace in one another, which lives throughout the thing. Sometimes you get out of who you are or very much enveloped in the thing you are known for when you grow older. It’s important to find yourself back at the people who knew you when and before everything else. To support you and hold you up. They don’t owe you nothing, but they feel like home and remind you of who you are.”
In portraying her role, Ingram reveals, “The most important thing to get right with Jolene was to have her be aware of her blackness. In a space like the orphanage, where she was the only one, it could very easily become what it is. We don’t get so much of Jolene’s life but it was important for me to really flesh her out and make her as full as possible. So in the flashes, when you do get Jolene in the series, she feels like a whole person. I had a teacher who would always say, ‘it’s important to have a back. And she has one. You’re responsibility to the person you are playing is the same every time. To give them the backstory, give them the life that people don’t see.”
PREDICT the 2021 Emmy nominees through July 13
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