Simbi Khali
Simbi Khali is an actor, born 1971.
Simbi Khali, sometimes credited as Simbi Kali Williams, was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1971 and came up through theatre, with The Colored Museum, For Colored Girls, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Troilus and Cressida behind her. That is a stranger foundation than most sitcom regulars have, and it shows in the timing.
Nina Campbell on 3rd Rock from the Sun is the role. On a series built entirely out of aliens being astonished by ordinary human life, somebody had to be unimpressed, and Khali played the office worker who had seen more than enough. It is a thankless structural job and she turned it into one of the show's reliable laughs, cutting a scene down with a flat line reading while three other actors were doing something enormous a few feet away.
Around it she worked steadily through the 1990s: Laquita on Martin, Nikki in Vampire in Brooklyn, Adrienne in A Thin Line Between Love and Hate, and later Alma Givens in We Were Soldiers, a war film that gave her nothing funny to do and proved she did not need it. She has also built a voice career in games, including Varesh Ossa in Guild Wars Nightfall and Amanda in Detroit: Become Human, neither of which is among the credits listed here.
Movies (3)
TV (4)
Where to start with Simbi Khali
Go straight to 3rd Rock from the Sun, and start almost anywhere in it: the show is episodic enough that a random mid-run episode will show you what Nina does to a scene. Watch how rarely she raises her voice compared with everyone else on screen.
Martin is the other 1990s sitcom worth sampling for her, and Vampire in Brooklyn is the Eddie Murphy oddity that has aged into something more interesting than its reception. A Thin Line Between Love and Hate is the sharper of the two films. If you want her out of comedy entirely, We Were Soldiers is the serious one and she holds the home-front material without sentimentality. That '80s Show is a curio only.