“I think what was most important was to remember the lightness of being young and the freedom of your mouth,” The Queen’s Gambit star Moses Ingram said about playing her character Jolene as her younger and older self in the Netflix limited series.
“Because you haven’t really learned how to protect other people from when you are talking, sort of like the rubberbandiness in your body,” the Emmy nominee added in a near-perfect description. “And then as she got older, it was more about being more solid and grown and having a back and being strong and confident in a way that she wasn’t when she was younger.”
In the running for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie this year, Ingram was speaking at Deadline’s Contenders TV: The Nominees virtual gathering. Set to appear in Disney+’s Obi-Wan Kenobi series, the actor was joined by some of her fellow nominees: music composer Carlos Rafael Rivera; casting director Ellen Lewis; EP William Horberg; and Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who plays Benny Watts, the aptly described “cocky, cowboy-like, pirate-like, rock star of chess” in the drama starring the Anya Taylor-Joy from writer-director Scott Frank.
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“Scott does like working with actors that he’s worked with before. Thus, Thomas we knew we wanted to have be a part of this right from the get-go as he was so much fun in Godless,” she noted of the Emmy-winning Western drama that debuted on Netflix in 2017.
“Jolene certainly was a challenge in some ways but also just a fantastic character to get to explore,” Lewis added about the role that went to relative newcomer Ingram. “And we were so lucky that Moses was just out of school and Kate Sprance my co-casting director had seen her presentation and it was just like a gift to get to see you and cast you in this.”
Based on Walter Tevi’s 1983 novel, The Queen’s Gambit proved a global sensation with its October 23 launch and goes into next month’s Emmy ceremonies with 18 total nominations from the TV Academy. One of my Top 10 shows of last year, it follows Beth Harmon (Taylor-Joy), a young girl abandoned to a Kentucky orphanage in the late 1950s who discovers an astonishing talent for chess while battling addiction and the struggles that come with the true gift of genius.
The streamer’s most-watched scripted miniseries, The Queen’s Gambit sparked a surging interest in the strategic game of chess across an America then in the depths of the Covid pandemic.
However, that was all to come, as Hoberg pointed out of the show’s appearance “without a lot of hullabaloo or fanfare.”
“It was word of mouth. People were telling people, ‘You got to see this show, I don’t care if you know how to play chess or not,’” the Talented Mr. Ripley producer asserted of The Queen’s Gambit’s success.
Checkmate.
Check out the panel video above.
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