Over the last year, Lena Waithe’s career has exploded: in November, she won an Emmy for the Master of None episode she wrote about coming out, and a couple months later, her show The Chi premiered on Showtime. Now, she’s set to star in the Steven Spielberg movie Ready Player One.
On Wednesday night’s episode of Late Night with Seth Meyers, Meyers and Waithe talked more about her creative wheelhouse. Meyers shared that he “heard you say that you do want to explore different versions of yourself in your art. And you want to be a Kanye.” Waithe and Kanye are both from Chicago, so her admiration makes sense.
Waithe explained, “Here’s what I’ll say: here’s the dope thing about Kanye. Every album, you didn’t know what Kanye you were gonna get. It was always different, it was always fresh, but it was always dope. You couldn’t not talk about it. So for me, it’s like everything, from Master Of None, The Chi, Ready Player One, I like to keep people guessing,” she said.
She added, “And, I think, sometimes people want to put you in a box. I’m like, ‘No, not this kid.’ Like, ‘I’m gonna keep messing with your mind.’ Next thing, I might do a Scorsese movie. I might be his [assistant director]. I don’t know.”
Though it seems like Waithe was an overnight success, she’s actually be in the film and television industry for years. She was a writer for the TV show Bones, and a producer for the 2014 film Dear White People. More recently, in addition to the numerous accolades she’s gained over the last year, she starred in an episode of the TV show This Is Us.
Ready Player One is set to release on March 29.
