Gbemisola Ikumelo (‘A League of Their Own’): ‘I fell in love with her’ and ‘the world of in-jokes between two friends’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
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“I fell in love with her,” declares Gbemisola Ikumelo about portraying fan-favorite character Chance Morgan on “A League of Their Own.” For our recent webchat she adds, “A lot of it was in the writing. She jumps off the page and you just go, ‘don’t screw it up, it’s all here!’ But also, there’s a real freedom given to us on set to play and to improvise and to go, ‘OK, this take is for you guys to mess around, so I think in playing, you’re finding other layers for the character. I didn’t think she was funny. Actually, I wasn’t setting out to play this comic role. But when it’s improvised and you get to see what the bond looks like between two friends, it is funny and you come into the world of in-jokes between two friends, but your audience become one of those friends that gets to bounce with us.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
SEE ‘A League of Their Own’ gets an abbreviated final season from Amazon
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“A League of Their Own” was created by Abbi Jacobson (“Broad City”) and Will Graham (“Mozart in the Jungle”), adapted from the classic 1992 Penny Marshall comedy film of the same name, but with new characters and storylines. The Amazon Prime Video comedy series is set in 1943, during the formation of the Rockford Peaches, a World War II-era women’s professional baseball team in the nascent All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Co-creator Jacobson also starring alongside Ikumelo, Emmy nominee D’Arcy Carden (“The Good Place”), Chanté Adams, Melanie Field, Roberta Colindrez, Kelly McCormack, Molly Ephraim, Priscilla Delgado and Kate Berlant.
To date, Ikumelo is best known for her work as co-writer and star of British sketch comedy “Famalam” (for which she has received two BAFTA nominations for Female Comedy Performance) and her latest BBC One comedy thriller “Black Ops.” But Stateside, legions of “A League of Their Own” fans have taken to her nerdy comic-book artist Chance Morgan as one of the breakout characters on the show, and she’s already claimed a nomination for Best Supporting Performance in a New Scripted Series at this year’s Independent Spirit Awards for the role. “It’s so beautiful to see how many people have adopted her as a sort of proxy for best friends,” she says. “The idea of a best friend. I love that so much and I wasn’t even expecting it.”
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