Niecy Nash-Betts is having a really good year.
In February, the Palmdale, California, native and her wife, Jessica Betts, made media history as the first-ever same-sex couple to appear on the cover of the venerable Essence magazine. Fast-forward to fall: She’s back as the exasperated but loving therapist on Never Have I Ever; she’s currently earning praise for her turn as Glenda Cleveland, the woman who tried to warn officials about the serial killer next door, in Netflix’s Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story; and a week after the latter series quietly dropped (more on that later), Nash-Betts is appearing as the lead in The Rookie: Feds, ABC’s spin-off of its dramedy The Rookie.
All this comes after decades of work, of course, and hit after hit: The four-time Emmy nominee and Daytime Emmy winner has done everything from bit parts and guest appearances (Party of Five, 1995) to reality TV (Clean House, 2003 to 2010) to fall-down funny comedy (Reno 911, 2003 to 2009, and 2020 to the present) to intense drama (When They See Us, 2019).
But 2022 finds her thriving like never before, and so when Shondaland got a chance to chat with Nash-Betts at a dinner ABC hosted for The Rookie: Feds recently, there was really only one overarching question: What does it feel like to be in the midst of a full-fledged … Niecy-ssance?
“I’m going to say it and not cry so I keep my fake eyelashes on,” she says with that singular blend of wisecracking and wisdom that makes her so adored by her fans. “I feel very, very blessed. Because I know what God called me to do. And I know that I know how to do it.”
Sitting in a corner of Post & Beam, a soul food restaurant in Los Angeles’ Baldwin Hills neighborhood, Nash-Betts is being received and toasted in a spot literally a few miles away from where she grew up — “A little further from here, the raggedy part,” she quips of Compton, the infamous area known, historically at least, for poverty and violence. Yet Compton has also produced a number of leaders and talents — the Williams sisters, Kevin Costner, and Ava DuVernay among them — and helped give her the grit and determination to follow through with what she wanted to do with her life.
“When I was 5 years old, God stamped my destiny on the canvas of my imagination,” she says as Jessica, beside her, dispenses occasional love taps. “When I saw Lola Falana, [a] beautiful Black woman in a long red dress, my eyes crossed. I looked at my grandmother and said, ‘Who is that?’ She said, ‘Baby, that’s Lola Falana.’ And I said, ‘That’s what I want to be. I want to be Black, fabulous, and on TV.’”
Done and done. Nash-Betts is now not only on TV but leading a prime-time network procedural crafted to reach millions — one of the biggest votes of confidence an actor can achieve. In The Rookie: Feds, she plays Simone Clark, a former guidance counselor who, like Nathan Fillion’s character John in the preceding series, joins law enforcement in her late 40s — in Clark’s case the FBI. (Clark is 48; Nash-Betts is 52.)
After Nash-Betts appeared in two episodes in season four of The Rookie, producers felt strongly enough about Nash-Betts’ appeal to give Clark a series of her own. Much like the actor who plays her, Clark is strong-willed, very naturally funny, and not unwilling to rock the proverbial boat. Executive producer Terence Paul Winter says having Nash-Betts in the role, which is based on a real-life Black female FBI agent, is loaded with significance — and care. At a time when Black women are being more vocal, and more heard, about the ways they are sometimes unfairly charged with emotional labor and saving everyone else at the expense of their own needs, the producers of The Rookie: Feds made sure to balance her heroism with her humanity.
“She’s gonna have a point of view, especially someone who’s lived the life she’s had,” says Winter. “She doesn’t have to be the fix-all who saves everyone. But she has a distinctive point of view. And this is a woman who is vital for an institution that has traditionally not given agency to people that look like her. And she’s unapologetically who she is.”
Even more care and consideration was given to the role in light of the events of 2020, and increased scrutiny of law enforcement in general. While it’s certainly significant to see a Black woman as a “good guy” working in criminal justice (and Nash-Betts isn’t alone here; Queen Latifah leads The Equalizer on CBS as a former CIA agent turned vigilante), the relationship between the Black community and law enforcement has been tricky, to say the least, especially lately.
Amid calls for defunding and abolishing police, Nash-Betts is stepping into a role that could make her seem out of step. But Winter and his co-executive producer Alexi Hawley, who spent a lot of time tweaking the program after the global protests of 2020, baked in ways to bring these discussions to the forefront rather than hiding from them. In The Rookie: Feds, Clark’s father, played by veteran actor Frankie Faison, leads a community coalition to defund police. Through their relationship, viewers see father and daughter dialogue about policing and its complicated relationship with Black Americans.
“So, we have real conversations about [law enforcement], the same as you would inside your home,” Nash-Betts says. “Everybody doesn’t agree on the same thing, whether it’s politics, religion … so to be in a space where we can unpack those differences in love, I think is a good gig.”
This role, as it turns out, is not the only one she’s had to navigate with some savvy this year. Since the September 21 release of Dahmer — which seemed to appear out of nowhere without the usual pre-release publicity and advance episodes sent to media — there’s been a lot of pushback about it online and among family members of victims who had no idea it was coming, and have deemed it cruel for making them revisit a painful chapter of their lives.
Nash-Betts tells Shondaland she hadn’t heard those critiques but said she felt, when asked by the series’ co-creator Ryan Murphy to play the woman who desperately tried to alert police to murders happening in her building, a level of responsibility. A central theme of Dahmer is how a Black woman’s informed alarms went repeatedly ignored, allowing for Jeffrey Dahmer, whose victims were almost all men of color, to kill so many while deliberately knowing that because he was white, he would be presumed innocent. “Finally,” Nash-Betts says, “Glenda gets to be heard.”
More visible than ever, Nash-Betts doesn’t seem particularly contemplative about why this year has shaped up to be the year of the Niecy-ssance. Rather, now is simply the culmination of a lot of work, a lot of focus, and, she says, an intentional effort to be kind and help whomever she can however she can.
“There is something that happens, I feel like, when the jambalaya starts to simmer,” she says. “It’s all sorts of things in the pot. The Dahmer pot, The Rookie: Feds in the pot, the greatest love of my life in the pot — someone to share your successes with, in the pot. And that takes feeling blessed to [a new level of] feeling blessed beyond measure.”
Malcolm Venable is a Senior Staff Writer at Shondaland. Follow him on Twitter @malcolmvenable.
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