Angela Bassett: Getting Her Groove On As Narrator of National Geographic’s ‘Queens’
11.06.2024 - 21:05
/ deadline.com
Angela Bassett’s career took off in the 1990s with films including What’s Love Got to Do with It – which earned the actress her first Oscar nomination — Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back.
But her success in just the past half-dozen years has managed to surpass the Yale Drama School graduate’s initial rise to fame.
In the latest example of a surge that began with 2018’s Black Panther, Bassett’s powerful, mellifluous voice provides the narration for a groundbreaking Emmy-contending National Geographic wildlife documentary series, Queens, which chronicles the natural world and its distaff leaders through a uniquely female lens.
Bassett’s voice illuminates stories of species as diverse as elephants, hyenas, whales, lions and bears and how they are led by females with a range of leadership styles. It’s another breaking of the mold of traditional natural history filmmaking, which has historically used a man as a “voice of God” narrator.
Perhaps Bassett’s work can now be considered “voice of Goddess.” It ranges from dramatic to apprehensive, exuberant to playful, and comedic to awe-inspiring. She comes to the recording booth as a seasoned VO pro. Bassett has earned three Primetime Emmy nominations in recent years as a narrator, in 2019, 2020 and last year for voicing Prime Video’s documentary Good Night Oppy, about NASA’s robotic mission to Mars.
Deadline spoke with Bassett about the experience of working on Queens, her role on the continuing hit show 9-1-1 and what receiving her recent honorary Academy Award means to her and to others striving to survive and thrive in the entertainment industry.
DEADLINE: What initially drove you to become the executive producer and narrator of this incredible project for