A League of Their Own 's Chanté Adams Says Angela Bassett Is Her Greatest Acting Inspiration

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Chanté Adams is a star on the rise — but there's one actress, in particular, who inspired her to continue striving for greatness in the acting space.

While speaking about her new Prime Video series, A League of Their Own, which is out Friday, Adams opened up about how she got bit by the acting bug.

"I auditioned for a play my freshman year, first day of high school, only because my friend was auditioning and I didn't want to be left alone and look lame. So I was like, 'I'll just go with you and wait for you,'" Adams, 27, explains. "And then my drama teacher was like, 'If you're going to wait here, you have to audition.' And I was like, 'All right, girl. Give me the lines.' So I read the lines, and then the next day, my name was on a cast list to do a play."

Recalling her own reaction at the time, Adams adds: "I was like, 'What? You know, I have a couple months till cheer tryouts, so I guess I'll do it to pass by the time.' And then I was like, 'I guess I can do the next one,' and then I was like, 'I guess I'll do the next one,' and then before I know it, I had a degree in acting."

Adams, who went on to earn her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, has been acting ever since. But without hesitation, she tells PEOPLE that acclaimed actress Angela Bassett inspired her to want to continue down this path even more.

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Dalvin Adams

"Iconic," Adams says of Bassett, 63. "Just watching her in What's Love Got to Do With It, I just remember the moment so vividly. I was sitting on the Megabus on my way to New York, and they were like, 'Have you ever watched What's Love Got to Do With It?' I was like, 'No.'"

Seeing Bassett's performance helped shift her perspective on what she wants for her own acting career.

"I watched that movie and I was like, 'Oh, that's what I want to do. I'm going to do that,'" she recalls. "I want to make people feel the way that she made people feel."

In addition to Bassett, Adams is also a big Regina King fan: "I feel like those two are my main people that I'm just absolutely obsessed with."

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Adams, so far, has been able to bulk up her résumé with a lot of her "dream roles." She starred as rapper Roxanne Shante in Sundance Film Festival hit Roxanne Roxanne, and opposite PEOPLE's 2020 Sexiest Man Alive titleholder Michael B. Jordan in A Journal for Jordan. She has also appeared in Monsters and Men, Voyagers and The Photograph.

"God shows out before I get that chance to quit," she says. "While I'm working and I'm on set for 16 hours a day for five to six days out of the week, there have been times that I'm like, 'I would rather be doing anything else at this point.' But then I realize that a lot of people have this dream, and I'm just one of the lucky ones that are able to actually live it. And so I just go back to that space of gratitude, and I'm just like, 'I can handle this.'"

Anne Marie Fox / ©Amazon / Courtesy Everett Collection

Next up, Adams is hitting the baseball field for Prime Video's A League of Their Own reboot. She stars as Max Chapman — a queer Black woman in the 1940s with aspirations to be a professional baseball player.

"Max, she's fighting a war on three fronts," she explains. "Especially in the 1940s of being Black, queer and a woman. And also add in the fact that she's trying to play baseball. But the fact that she is very determined to do whatever it takes in order for her to accomplish her dream, which is to get on a team and to be able to play baseball with like-minded individuals, I think that should inspire every human who watches the show to go after it and do the damn thing."

"Even though you might get a lot of nos, you're not getting a never," she adds.

The remake — which comes 30 years after the 1992 film starring Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, Madonna and Rosie O'Donnell — uniquely explores Max's own experience to that of star/co-creator Abbi Jacobson's character Carson Shaw, which is vastly different due to race.

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"It's not the story of the All-American Professional Girls Baseball League. It's a story about a generation of women who played baseball, and there were more than just white women that did that," says Adams, whose character is based on three real-life Black female baseball players: Mamie Johnson, Toni Stone and Connie Morgan.

"It's important to include women of color into that narrative, into that story, as well, because we are trying to make a very authentic representation of that time period," she continues. "And so yeah, we couldn't just make a story about white women in baseball. That's been done already."

A League of Their Own premieres on Aug. 12 on Prime Video.