Regina Hall

Regina Hall was born in Washington, D.C. in 1970 and was almost thirty before screen work took hold: Ally McBeal in the late nineties, The Best Man in 1999, then a single year that produced both Love and Basketball and Scary Movie. The second one defined the next decade. Brenda Meeks, the friend who talks through the film in the cinema and is entirely unbothered by anything happening around her, ran across four Scary Movie films and is being revived for a fifth.

The joke of Brenda is conviction. Hall plays her without a shred of irony, which is why the character survives four increasingly desperate parodies: everyone else is winking, she is not. That absolute commitment is the same instrument she uses in drama, and once you notice it the rest of her career reorganises itself. Trinitie Childs in Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul, a megachurch first lady holding a smile through humiliation, is the identical performance played straight, and it is unbearable to watch in the best way.

The turn came in 2017 and 2018. Girls Trip was the enormous hit and she is the sober centre of it. Support the Girls, a low-key film about a sports bar manager holding her staff together, won her the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress, the first African American to take it. The Hate U Give landed in the same stretch, Master four years later.

She still works both registers in the same year, which is rarer than it sounds, and the comedy has never been the compromise.