Nicole Beharie received her first Emmy nomination this year, for her performance in the third season of “The Morning Show,” and she was sick in bed when she found out about it. “I had a little bout of COVID, and I was in bed after doing, like, a 16-hour day, and someone called me and was like, ‘Oh my God, girl!’ And I was like, ‘What’s happening? What’s going on?’ And then my manager called and I was like, ‘This is not funny!’ I actually didn’t believe it. And I was also under the weather, so it was like, ‘This is kind of not a funny joke.’ And then I looked it up myself and… it feels good,” she tells Gold Derby during a recent webchat (watch the full exclusive video interview above). “It’s a surprise for me. You know, this whole job has been a massive gift.”
Beharie joined Season 3 of “The Morning Show” as Christina Hunter, an Olympic gold medalist-turned-TV personality who takes over as co-host of the Apple TV+ series’ titular daily morning news program after Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) vacates the position to anchor UBA’s nightly news. Conversations between Christina and her husband, Marcus (Alano Miller), reveal that the erstwhile athlete was at first reluctant about taking the job, but Beharie believes that she ultimately did it because it offers her the visibility she needs to sustain her lifestyle.
“I looked at other relationships that were either managers, like parent managers or spouse managers, and [Miller and I] discussed that she felt like there were other options — branding options, sort of less-sweet options… Being on a morning show, there’s a sort of all-American, spunky, bright and, dare I say, earnest presentation that I don’t know is Christina all the time,” the Emmy-nominated actor says about her character’s initial reservations. “With my research, it was just, like, looking at these relationships, looking at people who have been sort of covered and protected and managed by spouses or parents, [and learning] that they tend to make the decision that seems like it’s gonna have the longest lead and, like, the most opportunities for exposure, ultimately. So to be in someone’s house every morning and become a household name and face is… the best option for her.”
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While the idea was for Christina to be “that big hopeful, good morning hug” that would “invigorate” viewers of “The Morning Show” and get them ready for the day, as Beharie puts it, it’s not long before the character finds herself at the center of an intense media storm. In the third episode, “White Noise” — Beharie’s Emmy submission — an old email of UBA board president Cybil Reynold’s (Holland Taylor) resurfaces in which she refers to the new morning show host as “Aunt Jemima” while discussing her hiring. Later in the episode, Christina puts Cybil on the spot by interviewing her live on “TMS” — resulting in an intense six-minute scene that quickly became one of the season’s most talked about moments.
In order to prepare for this climactic moment, Beharie watched and studied a handful of interviews that helped her understand how an interviewer might conduct themselves under circumstances similar to Christina’s. “You see everyone trying to cover their hurt, trying to cover and take care of their company and make sure that their brand isn’t diminished. And I think that that’s a big part of… what Chris was doing,” the actor shares. “But there is a cathartic element to what happened on the show that I never saw in a lot of interviews, right? [In] interviews where people are actually, like, putting someone on the spot, oftentimes, they use velvet gloves or they take the pressure off. And in this instance, I think the velvet gloves are there — there’s logic — but she doesn’t take the pressure off. She continues to ask the questions. And… I think that’s what made people just connect so much to it.”
Beharie admits that there was a moment in which the director of the episode, Thomas Carter, told her to “nail” Cybil in the scene — a piece of direction that, she says, could have been translated in “a number of different ways.” “I know that the reality is that you actually don’t get mad, you don’t get louder, you don’t — there’s none of that. You have to sort of give people the space to explain themselves, no matter how much you have going on or whatever you feel about it,” she elaborates. “And I think that that’s the thing that journalists… have to honor. And I think that we did that. But I do think that we took it a little bit further, in that [in] all the interviews that I watched, people… asked the top three questions, but they don’t get to six.”
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