As Lena Waithe stood in front of her childhood home in Chicago’s South Side in October, images very different from the ones depicted on the news these days began coming to her. Instead of gang wars and unremitting violence, Waithe, the first African-American woman to win an Emmy for comedy series writing, saw in her mind’s eye scenes of children joyously running in the streets and parents gathering at a neighbour’s house for a card game.
With The Chi, a drama that debuted in January , Waithe aims to paint her city in all its complexities and nuances. She is the creator of this kaleidoscopic series that follows the interweaving stories of several young men, most notably Jason Mitchell (Mudbound, Straight Outta Compton) as an aspiring chef and Alex R. Hibbert (Moonlight) as a wide-eyed preteenager. The Chi doesn’t ignore the brutality of day-to-day life, but rather focuses on the humanity it can devastate.
“My mission is to show these young black men are not born with a gun in their hand,” Waithe said over brunch that day at a downtown diner. “These are kids who come out with all the promise and hope that any other kid does.”
“I wanted to humanise them and show that their lives are valid,” she added. “But I don’t paint us in a perfect light at all. My hope is that I can show us in an honest way. That’s it. Not bad. Not perfect. Just accurate.”
Waithe, 33, has lived and worked in Los Angeles for more than a decade now, but she said her recent success — in March she makes her major-studio film debut as an actor in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One — is the product of a grinder’s mentality first learned in Chicago. And she credits much of that tenacity to her mother, Laverne Hall, who raised her and her sister after a divorce when Waithe was three.
Despite working odd jobs with night-shift hours, including as a factory worker, Waithe’s mother found time to enrol her children at Turner-Drew, an acclaimed magnet elementary school that was almost entirely African-American. “It was like this hidden gem,” Waithe said of her idyllic primary school. “I don’t know how my mom discovered it, but she was always a hustler in that way.”
When she was 12, her family relocated to the more upscale and racially diverse suburb of Evanston. There Waithe became fascinated with creative writing and television shows — her favourites were The Cosby Show and A Different World — so much so that she majored in TV writing and producing at Columbia College Chicago. Moving to Los Angeles was just a matter of time.
After three years of scraping by while living in a dingy Toluca Lake apartment there, Waithe was hired in 2009 by a then-unknown filmmaker, Ava DuVernay, to be her assistant on her directorial debut, I Will Follow.
“She was this wonderful, funny, passionate young woman who would just do whatever it took from locking up to getting coffee to cleaning up,” said DuVernay, who would go on to direct Selma. When the film wrapped production, DuVernay encouraged Waithe to chart her own creative course and not wait around for opportunities to be offered.
Waithe embraced the advice, writing and directing her own short film, Save Me, which landed her writing and production jobs on shows like Bones and Dear White People. In 2014, she wrote the pilot script for The Chi, and it quickly attracted interest from several networks.
Gary Levine, Showtime’s president of programming, said he and his colleagues were entranced by the pilot script. “It was both really dramatic and really intimate,” he said. “It was about a city, and yet it was really about these characters. It felt like it shined a light on a world we don’t get to see on television and a world that was really personal to Lena. And that came through loud and clear.”
Waithe chose Showtime in part because it’s home to one of her favourite shows, The Affair.
“I just liked the bravery,” she said. “They’re taking chances and taking risks and are a little bit off the beaten path.”
Intimate stories
To her collaborators, Waithe is the daring one. Aziz Ansari, the star and co-creator of Master of None, cast Waithe as his character Dev’s close friend, Denise. And it was after hearing her tell intimate stories about coming out to her mother as a lesbian that Ansari urged Waithe to turn it into material for the show. The resulting Thanksgiving episode, written with Ansari, won an Emmy. (Angela Bassett, who was cast as Denise’s mother, received an Emmy nomination for her guest performance.)
“I’ve found just throughout my career when you’re that vulnerable and really share the stuff you think maybe you shouldn’t,” Ansari said, “that’s when you succeed wildly.”
The show’s honesty was also appealing to the cast of The Chi. “It’s not one of those shows that’s all glitz and glamour, all Skittles and quinoa,” Mitchell said. “It’s the real truth.”
Having lost friends to gun violence when growing up in New Orleans, the actor said appearing in the drama “was one of those times where it’s more therapy than acting.”
Common, a fellow Chicago native who is an executive producer and one of the stars of The Chi,” said Waithe stressed during filming how important it was for the show to pay homage to her city. “And so we’ve got a mission to be as authentic as we can,” he said. They employed a crew composed almost entirely of locals, shot on location and filled the soundtrack exclusively with music by Chicago artists like Chance the Rapper and Kanye West.
Thanks to the new show, and acting roles on Master of None and Transparent, she’s slowly becoming a Chicago celebrity, too. Late that afternoon in October, as Waithe stood in front of her elementary school and gazed at the large blue sign outside its main entrance, a burly security guard approached as if to make sure she wasn’t causing any trouble. But as he got closer, he recognised Waithe and yelled to the principal: “It’s all good! I knew she was famous!”
That evening, Waithe enjoyed one of the perks of her newfound celebrity, joining a panel discussion entitled The Power of Black Women with the editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue, Elaine Welteroth, and Uber’s chief brand officer, Bozoma St John. Waithe said the topic was timely. She first noticed Hollywood was becoming more open-minded to racial diversity when, in early 2017, driving down Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles, she saw a towering billboard for the HBO comedy Insecure, starring the African-American actress Issa Rae. That it sat next to a minuscule ad for the same network’s Sarah Jessica Parker-led series Divorce signalled to her a reshaping of a powerful network’s priorities.
“We are not in the same world anymore,” she said. “Even white people are tired of watching white people’s shows.”
Though Ansari said he agreed “things are kind of going in the right direction, I don’t think it’s a tidal wave of change” in terms of more stories starring or written by minorities being greenlit.
“We’re all kind of chipping away,” Ansari said, referring to Waithe, Rae and Donald Glover (FX’s Atlanta). “There’s a responsibility for me to use the platform I have to pull in other people. Not just people that look like me but other people like Lena. Because, no offense, but how many more times can you see a white guy chase after the white woman?”
Waithe agrees, and made it a point to tell her peers. When she accepted her Emmy Award in September to a standing ovation, she said “the things that makes us different — those are our superpowers.”
A month later, at the brunch in Chicago, Waithe, wearing a tie-dye T-shirt, ripped jeans and red-and-white Air Jordan sneakers, elaborated on her speech’s message. “I’m proud to carry that torch and be like ‘I’m gay! I’m black! Hang your dreams on me. Hang your hopes on me. I’ll carry them to the best of my ability.’”
Although she no longer lives in Chicago, she said working on such a personal show like The Chi felt fitting.
“Because wherever I go, the Chi goes with me,” Waithe said of her hometown. “People always go, ‘Damn, how you got all this happening at once?’” She laughed. “I tell them it’s the Chicago in me.”
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Don’t miss it!
The Chi is now streaming on OSN Play.
