Lena Waithe is The Hollywood Reporter’s Producer of the Year

How do you become The Hollywood Reporter’s Producer of the Year? If you’re Lena Waithe, you have four shows on the air at once, including the new Quibi series You Ain’t Got These, plus, a producer credit on The 40-Year-Old Version, which in January won a Directing award at Sundance. Add in the upcoming feature film Beauty, starring Sharon Stone, Giancarlo Esposito and Niecy Nash, which Waithe wrote. Let’s also not forget Hillman Grad Productions, the company Waithe founded in 2015 and continues to oversee. Did we mention she also starred in the latest season of Westworld? If Lena Waithe sleeps, she doesn’t do it very often.THR announced Waithe’s latest accolade on August 3, more than a month after Waithe called out the industry magazine for ignoring TV shows featuring mainly Black casts. During a June appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden, Waithe used her platform to speak out against THR and Variety for the lack of inclusion of Black TV shows on best- of lists."Look, I just read The Hollywood Reporter, and The Hollywood Reporter has some explaining to do, because their list of TV Emmy nominees, like, people that are hopefuls, all the Black shows are, like, on the long shot list or a major threat," said Waithe. "It's, like, don't act like Black television is invisible. And that's up to places like The Hollywood Reporter, and Variety, and all these trades, to not ignore the Insecures, the BlackAFs the Dear White Peoples. They have ignored our shows for so long, and they act like we don't even belong in the conversation. And I think it's unfair. I think it's not cool, and I don't have any qualms about calling them out on that."

 

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This is dedicated to my Black queer Kings and Queens out here with wunderkind dreams, a Chicago girl is ‘The Hollywood Reporter's TV Producer of the Year’. I am humbled to receive this honor. My lifelong mission is bigger than awards: making work that people can look at and say, “hey, that’s me”. Thank you motherland, the ancestors put me on game. ⁣ ⁣ Promise this my MOOD 4 EVA.

A post shared by Lena Waithe (@lenawaithe) on Aug 3, 2020 at 10:56am PDT

In 2017, Waithe became the first Black woman to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series for her work on Master of None. The “Thanksgiving” episode, which she also starred in, was loosely based on her own experience coming out to her mother. Waithe has often used personal experiences to create stories that feel real and raw, including The Chi, set in Waithe’s hometown of Chicago, and Twenties, which follows three best friends navigating their personal and professional lives in Los Angeles.Twenties stars Jonica "Jojo" T. Gibbs as Hattie, a character Waithe loosely based on herself. “People have these ideas of what a gay woman looks like. There's a chance I may fit into a stereotype of what a lesbian is because I'm a little more masculine-presenting. What I found in getting feedback on Twenties is that people didn't expect for her character Hattie to be so silly and warm. Because of how she presents, they think she'll be more aggressive — not listening to Whitney Houston while watching YouTube videos” said Waithe during her interview with THR. “I just wanted to write about my experience being in Los Angeles and having two straight best friends. There's this idea that all queer people only hang out with queer people.”Although Waithe’s Hattie provides representation not often found in mainstream media (Twenties airs on BET and Showtime), she’s quick to caution against audiences looking to one show or one character to speak for a community. “The bisexual community still doesn't have a ton of representation on television. There are still people whom we haven't explored — people who identify as asexual, nonbinary, gender queer, trans. It's important that people of a queer experience help tell those stories,” said Waithe. “Sometimes people ask me, ‘Hey, Lena, so you gay. I want to be educated about the trans community.’ Well, you should speak to a person who is of the trans experience. Just because we fall under the same LGBTQIA+ umbrella doesn't mean that I can educate you about every single letter.”Waithe, who last year wrote the screenplay for the critically-acclaimed feature film Queen & Slim, said that she has seen a slight shift in Hollywood’s willingness to invest in TV shows and films by Black creators and starring Black actors, but the change remains painfully slow.“I remember, with The Chi's character of Brandon [Jason Mitchell], I was like, ‘He's a Black boy with a dream.’ It was hard to have that conversation. For some reason, it just felt foreign [to executives]. That's no one's fault. I don't think anyone was trying to be racist. They just didn't have the understanding,” said Waithe. “That's the reckoning that's happening right now. Black people have always had hopes and dreams. And I think that has been very difficult sometimes for white execs to understand and to allow us the space to write stories about that. I remember being so frustrated on those calls. I was like, What is so hard to understand?’”[video_embed id='1839098']RELATED: Lena Waithe hopes 'Queen & Slim' will start conversations[/video_embed]