Despite racial inequity, Hollywood is brimming with melanin magic makers who bring raw talent to the big and small screen. With that in mind, we’d be remiss not to celebrate these luminaries this Women’s History Month.
A true thespian can do it all; invoke emotions of grief and sadness with soul-stirring performances, put audiences at ease with relatable portrayals, and give watchers moments of respite with laughs as they navigate an often callous world.
Bubbling Black Actresses do all of the aforementioned even while facing obstacles as double minorities. Most recently those issues were brought to the forefront by Taraji P. Henson who reveled in the opportunity to portray Shug Avery in The Color Purple but refused to remain silent on Hollywood’s inclusion issues.
In particular, the issue of pay disparity weighed on the actress’ spirit as she opined about Tinseltown’s affinity for underpaying and undervaluing Black women and admitted she once considered quitting.
“I’m just tired of working so hard, being gracious at what I do, getting paid a fraction of the cost,” Henson said in a SiriusXM with Gayle King. “I’m tired of hearing my sisters say the same thing over and over. You get tired. I hear people go, ‘You work a lot.’ I have to. The math ain’t mathing.”
“It seems every time I do something and break another glass ceiling, when it’s time to renegotiate, I’m at the bottom again, like I never did what I just did, and I’m tired,” she added.
She later doubled down on her words at the NAACP Image Awards after host Queen Latifah thanked her for “standing up for all of us.”
“It’s a scary thing to speak your truth but I urge you all to speak your truth because at the end of the day, that’s all we have,” she said while accepting her Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress. “And like they say, ‘the truth will set you free.’ And not only that, it will set somebody else free.”
As Taraji continues her truth-telling about fellow Black actresses, BOSSIP is shining a spotlight on her sistas in cinema blowing us away with their God-given gifts.
Last year, we highlighted sizzlers like Lauren Lott, Danielle Deadwyler, and Halle Bailey, this year, we’re adding more ladies to our list.
Lights, camera, action!
In no particular order, here’s BOSSIP’s Bubbling Black Actresses of 2024.
Thespian Taylor Russell Has What It Takes To Become A Household Name
Taylor Russell McKenzie (pka Taylor Russell) is a name you need to familiarize yourself with ASAP.
The Vancouver, Canada native is both an actress and a director and we believe that she will become a force to be reckoned with as her career continues to develop. At the age of 29, she’s already delivered several distinct performances that show her range and ability to transform on screen.
Take, for example, the 2022 film Bones And All, where Taylor plays a teenage girl named Maren Yearly alongside Dune star Timotheé Chalamet, who plays a young man named Lee, as a pair of love-struck cannibals, yes cannibals, trekking across the United States looking to reconcile their traumatic pasts. Not only is the blood-curdling script a subversive take on romance and horror but Russell puts on a full display of her talents as thespian.
As an auteur, Taylor Russell also has the eye for emotional depth and the heart for humanity that is required to tell stories like The Heart Still Hums, a documentary that she wrote and directed with her co-creative Savannah Leaf. The film chronicles the difficult life of five women who struggle with traumas like drug addiction, homelessness, and parental neglect while showing uninterrupted and unconditional motherly love to their young children.
Outside of her talents on screen and behind the camera, Taylor Russell serves look and gives runway with the best of them. Let’s be clear, there is a very good reason why VOGUE Italia, Loewe, and Variety want her front and center on their covers and campaigns. Just…look at her.
Like…
C’mon now…
Beyond all the aforementioned attributes and adjectives, Taylor Russell McKenzie is a person and her life experiences are more than glamour and glitz. She is the product of a biracial relationship between her white mother and Jamaican father. Some might be inclined to think that growing up in Canada would somehow shield her from the harmful isms that are associated with those walking in both worlds. Please do not drink that Kool-Aid.
During a 2018 interview with The Grio Taylor explained:
“I grew up in Vancouver which is beautiful but very Caucasian. When I moved to Toronto there were a lot more Black and mixed people. I have always had people who wanted to touch my hair and Black girls not accepting me because I’m too light-skinned to fit in with them and white girls who rejected me because I was different than them too,” said Russell.
“A lot of identity issues come from that and I dealt with identity issues growing up because I didn’t grow up with my dad’s side of the family.
We have no idea what Taylor Russell has coming up but we’ll definitely be watching.
–Jason Lee
‘The Bear’s’ Breakout Star Ayo Edebiri Can’t Be Stopped
2024 has only just begun and Ayo Edebiri is already having a blockbuster year.
Edebiri was raised an only child in Dorchester, Massachusetts by a mother who immigrated from Barbados and a father who immigrated from Nigeria. Both had high expectations for their daughter, which is a big reason why she felt a lot of pressure growing up.
“I didn’t identify as funny, I identified as stressed,” she told Vogue of her childhood.
Comedian, actor, fashion darling…and soon-to-be-director? How Ayo Edebiri became Hollywood’s most beloved new star pic.twitter.com/cfpadR62jG
— Vogue Magazine (@voguemagazine) March 25, 2024
In eighth grade, she recognized just how easily she could use humor as a tool, which is when she became interested in doing stand-up comedy.
“I was like, I like how this feels!” she said of embracing comedy. “I also feel like it means that I understand people, like I understand what they want.”
Ayo went to college at New York University, where she eventually switched her major from something more practical–teaching–to dramatic writing, which ultimately led to her writing gigs on shows like What We Do in the Shadows, Dickinson, and Big Mouth.
She later transitioned from the writers’ room to being in front of the camera, landing her breakout role as Chef Sydney in The Bear in 2022. She’s set to make her debut as a director this spring on an episode of season three.
“I think you’d be a sociopath if you were to say, “Absolutely”,’ she told ELLE when asked if she expected The Bear to be such a runaway success. “I think we all had positive feelings while we were making the show and there was something very cathartic about the process. I wanted to work with everybody again because the scripts felt good [to read] and working with these people feels good. But you never know how people are seeing things.”
After audiences fell in love with Edebiri on the comedy-drama series, she was everywhere in 2023, starring in Bottoms with her NYU classmate Rachel Sennott and landing guest spots on Black Mirror and Abbott Elementary.
She kicked off this year with a bang by winning Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes and hosting an episode of Saturday Night Live. Despite her already-busy filming schedule, she’s set to appear in films including A24 indie horror Opus with John Malkovich and Omni Loop with Mary-Louise Parker later this year.
–Rebecah Jacobs
Diarra Kilpatrick’s Quick Wit & Comedic Chops Make Mystery ‘Oh So Alluring
A Motor City native is making waves with a series that highlights her hometown as well as her wit, skill, and comedic chops.
Diarra Kilpatrick is one to watch.
The actress/writer/producer is far from a newbie on the Hollywood scene but now she’s front and center right where she belongs. The multihyphenate who studied drama at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts has starred in Perry Mason, The Last OG, and American Koko, her YouTube series that caught the eye of Viola Davis and Julius Tennon, whose JuVee Productions company went on to executive-produce it for ABC digital. In 2017, the husband and wife duo championed the creative while working with her and gushed about her talent.
“Diarra is just amazing, she has a unique perspective, a unique voice,” said Tennon to Access Hollywood about Kilpatrick.
“You don’t always find an artist who has a different voice, you find a lot of imitators out there,” added Davis who called the star “anointed” in her work.
Through her anointing, it’s clear that Kilpatrick is serious about her craft. Not only that, but she’s also serious about her stomping grounds which are highlighted in her BET+ series Diarra From Detroit. Although it was shot elsewhere, Kilpatrick was adamant about making sure the intricacies of Detroit were captured down to the slang and the spirit of the natives who she described as “some of the most fascinating and distinctive people” she’s ever met.
The eight-episode dark comedy executive produced by Kenya Barris follows a divorcing schoolteacher who refuses to believe she’s been ghosted by her rebound (and very fine) Tinder date. Her search for the missing man with whom she had a strong connection pulls her into a decades-old mystery involving the Detroit underworld. As the case unfolds, she assembles a Scooby-Doo-like crew to get the bottom of her date’s disappearance and it’s just as entertaining as it sounds.
During a recent panel conversation about Diarra From Detroit at ESSENCE Hollywood House with Stephanie Dunivan, Essence’s VP of Branded Solutions, Kilpatrick noted how the unique concept for the show came about.
“It’s a lot of things I love coming together, the city of Detroit, the city that I love, the genre that I love,” said Kilpatrick. “I love detective shows, mystery shows, I grew up sitting with my granny while she watched Perry Mason, Columbo, Matlock.”
She added that a real-life story about a Detroit child’s disappearance also “ignited her imagination” and led her to create the series that was created with Black women in mind.
“We made this show first for you. It’s so important to me to see black women of all shades, of all sizes, revealing just the truth about ourselves.”
The writer/actress later expanded on her love for mysteries in a PAPER magazine feature about the show that stars not only her but Morris Chestnut, Phylicia Rashad, DomiNque Perry, Bryan Clark, and Claudia Logan.
“I feel like it’s my duty to collect my inheritance,” said Kilpatrick. “When my grandmother passed on, the only thing I wanted [from her] was her VHS tapes. She didn’t have wealth to pass on to me — what she passed on was the experience of sitting up under her while she watched her stories. I don’t have a trust fund, I have the stories of my city, and I have the stories of the people who raised me and I feel like that’s how I’ll get my inheritance.”
The first three episodes of Diarra From Detroit premiered March 21 on BET+ with new episodes dropping weekly on Thursdays.
—Dani Canada