For Niecy Nash-Betts, the Fear Was Motivating
Reading the script for FX’s “Grotesquerie,” her latest effort with Ryan Murphy, was terrifying on multiple levels. But that’s what drew her in.
Niecy Nash-Betts is serious about finding “stolen moments” in life, she said, as a balance to her busy acting schedule. And she is quick to nudge others to do the same. During a recent lunch at an Italian restaurant in Calabasas, she fired off a few date-night suggestions for a reporter who had lackluster birthday plans — maybe a couples ceramics class?
“If you need to put a battery in your back, you’re talking to the right one!” she exclaimed. Indeed her battery always seems charged. Just last month, she wrapped production on a leading role in the FX horror series “Grotesquerie,” premiering Wednesday, her latest collaboration with Ryan Murphy — and then hopped immediately on a flight to the Amalfi Coast, in Italy, where she and her wife, the musician Jessica Betts, celebrated their fourth anniversary.
Back home barely a week, she was already gearing up to film with Murphy again this month, this time as comic relief in the Hulu legal drama “All’s Fair.” A year-end Mexico vacation was already in the works, as well.“You got to wring life out like a dirty rag,” she said as she sipped ice water, looking polished in a pink cotton gauze pantsuit, seemingly unfazed by the triple-digit temperatures scorching the San Fernando Valley. “You got to get every inch of it.”
In the past year, Nash-Betts also hosted her third season of the latest revival of “Don’t Forget the Lyrics!,” a weekly game show on Fox, and played a kindhearted confidant in the Ava DuVernay film “Origin,” her third collaboration with DuVernay after a minor part in “Selma” and her Emmy-nominated lead role in the Netflix series “When They See Us,” about the so-called Central Park Five.
It’s a hustle she has managed to maintain for nearly three decades, in a career comprising work in just about every genre and category imaginable. She has done sitcoms, web series, animated shows, crime procedurals, gritty dramas and reality TV. She even did a satirical infomercial with the New York Times Opinion section in 2018. (Its title: “To the Next ‘BBQ Becky’: Don’t Call 911. Call 1-844-WYT-FEAR.”)
But it may be her work with Murphy, which goes back a quarter-century, that has helped her to push her professional boundaries furthest. In January, she won an Emmy, her first, for her role in the Murphy production “Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.” Now “Grotesquerie” finds her delving yet again into new territory, jump-scare horror, as her character, Detective Lois Tryon, investigates a series of grisly, potentially supernatural small-town murders.
Murphy, who created “Grotesquerie” with Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken, described it by phone as “a meditation on the end of the world” and said he knew instinctively that Nash-Betts could stand up to the challenge.
“She can do anything,” he said. Nash-Betts, who is also an executive producer, said she knew she was in when she first read the script. It terrified her.
“The horror of this, coupled with the fact that I’m playing a character I’ve never played before,” she said, “was extremely satiating.”
Success was a slow build for Nash-Betts, 54, who for over a decade did mostly small and one-off roles in film and television. Initially known more for her comedic chops, her characters grew increasingly complex and dramatic in series like “Getting On” (2013-15), a HBO hospital dramedy, and “Claws” (2017-22), a comic crime drama on TNT that she led, playing a money-laundering nail salon owner.
For many years she was best known for her breakout role — which is also her longest-running one — as Deputy Raineesha Williams in “Reno 911!,” the mockumentary “Cops” spoof that debuted on Comedy Central in 2003. The show has seen many episodes and iterations since, including a revival run on the short-lived short-form streamer Quibi and three feature films.
Her character’s baby hair, prosthetic posterior and “not today” attitude made her a fan-favorite, even if the role demonstrated only a portion of Nash-Betts’s range.
“Niecy’s so funny because she’s an amazing dramatic actress,” said the comedian and “Reno 911!” co-creator Thomas Lennon in a phone interview. “It’s not in spite of or in addition to, it is actually the ‘therefore.’
DuVernay said by phone that authenticity — what she also called “a warmth, a connectivity” — was the key to Nash-Betts’s craft.
“Whether she’s playing a detective or a single mom or someone glamorous, she’s trying to find that thing that makes you recognize them as a human being,” DuVernay added. “Once she does that, she doesn’t let you go. She finds the everyday-ness in every role.”
Nash-Betts’s working relationship with Murphy began in 1998, when she was cast to play a talking lobster in an episode of the WB teen series “Popular,” which Murphy created with Gina Matthews. (“Even then, she had such soul and depth,” he said.) He is one of her biggest boosters, likening her performing prowess to that of Meryl Streep and Viola Davis.
“There was one scene that we wrote for her that was a seven-page monologue,” he said. “She did it over and over again on a hot summer day, and I don’t think she dropped a single word. There’s something amazing about her mind.”
Murphy added: “Even if she’s doing something very heavy and dramatic, she has a sense of humor, so she knows how to dance around a line. She’s very facile as an artist.”
But her part as the esteemed but privately tormented Detective Tryon in “Grotesquerie” held special challenges. Nash-Betts admitted she had initial reservations about playing “a woman who has the vices that my character has” — Tryon is an alcoholic — but her fears excited her. She tried her best to understand Tryon’s addiction, she said, and how the detective got to that point.
“A lot of the ways that people get into those spaces and places is pain, so there’s this underlying pain that you always have present,” she said. “Where’s the pain coming from? What’s the source of that? Then, identifying that, unpacking that and baking it into every scene.”
To ground herself in the character, Nash-Betts had to find places where she and the character overlapped — such “entry points” as her own experiences with motherhood (Raven Goodwin plays Tryon’s daughter, Merritt) and with marital strain (Courtney B. Vance plays her husband, Marshall).
“This is my third marriage — insert ‘crosses eyeballs’ here!” she said with an attendant sight gag. “So I understand what it’s like to be in emotional pain because your relationship is failing.”
But when asked whether the horror aspects of the show haunted her during production, she didn’t mention demons or occult rituals. She was much more troubled by the recurrent themes of human cruelty, something that distresses her off-set, as well.
“We are living in dark times, and you don’t even have to watch a TV show to know that,” she said.
Before our lunch interview, she took to Instagram to post about the Apalachee High School shooting, in Georgia, which had taken place the day before.
“My brother was murdered in ’93, and since then, the number of school shootings just keeps going up and up and up,” she said when asked about the posts. “People leave this earth every day, but school is the one place where you’re supposed to be safe.”
She wore a pendant necklace bearing a smiling photo of her brother, Michael Ensley, who was shot and killed at age 17 by another student at Reseda High School, in the San Fernando Valley — only about 10 miles from her current home in Calabasas.
“What those parents are feeling, you can’t compare it to anything else” she said. “I know exactly what all of them are feeling.”
Being the light for others is what helps her press on when things get bleak. For instance, she felt it was her duty to make the “Grotesquerie” cast and crew laugh in between filming particularly difficult scenes. (“She rallied the troops,” as Murphy put it.)
And when it comes to finding some light for herself?
“I married my comfort,” Nash-Betts said, explaining that Betts (whom viewers can spot in a small “Grotesquerie” cameo), would drop everything and head with their dog to the remote desert filming set to lift her spirits.
Traci Carter Holsey, the head of development for Nash-Betts’s production company Chocolate Chick Inc., who has been a friend since 1995, says this marriage signaled a shift in the actress’ approach to life.
“Before, I could call her if she was out at dinner, on the red carpet or wherever, and she would take the work call,” Carter Holsey said. “She has a protective space now. I’ve noticed how much more present and connected she is to the now — and how much she commits to enjoying what she’s been working toward.”
Nash-Betts agreed; “cultivating and curating” happiness has become her priority in this chapter of her life, she said — whether that’s taking a pasta-making class in southern Italy or testing the limits of her craft on set.
“I feel very grateful that I wake up every day and don’t live a life that I have to escape from,” she said. “I do what I want to do and I live the life that I want to live, so I love it here!”
