Da'Vine Joy Randolph Sweeps Awards Season with Best Supporting Actress Oscar Win
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The Holdovers actor Da’Vine Joy Randolph is now an Academy Award winner with an even brighter future.
The 37-year-old won trophies at the Golden Globes, Critics Choice, BAFTA, and Screen Actors Guild awards for her supporting role as Mary Lamb in the 2023 holiday flick, starring Paul Giamatti. Not surprisingly, she completed an awards season sweep during the 96th Academy Awards: winning the 2024 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
Although The Holdovers has put Randolph in the public eye in a major way, the Pennsylvania native has steadily absorbed more of the spotlight during her decade-long-plus career. Here are a few things you might not know about Randolph—one of Biography’s People You’ll Know in 2024—following her biggest moment yet.
She is a trained opera singer
Randolph, who was born on May 21, 1986, in Philadelphia, had no dreams of acting growing up. “I knew that I wanted to be of service to people in some way, shape or form, and do something that made people feel good or better,” she told W magazine in March 2022.
She was, however, smitten with Motown, R&B, and—eventually—classical music. When she was around 16 years old, Randolph was inspired to pursue a musical career after watching an all-Black ensemble perform at a Christmas recital. “I went up to the woman who impressed me the most and said, ‘You gotta teach me how to do crazy riffs, sing really loud and really long,’” she said.
Randolph started taking voice lessons, where she listened to singers like Maria Callas and Leontyne Price, and found opera to be “the ultimate art form.” She decided to study classical vocal performance at Temple University.
Randolph began taking acting seriously in college
At Temple, Randolph was heavily involved in musical theater, participating in productions of Into the Woods, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Our Lady of 121st Street, and Aida, though her focus was still primarily on music. But one day while she was copying music, she heard screaming and went to check it out. “I peeked into this door and it was an acting class,” she said. “I stood and watched; it sounds so cliché, but it was this moment of recognizing something within myself.”
Randolph decided to pivot into an acting major her senior year, graduating with a degree in Theater, Film, and Media Arts. She then attended Yale University, earning her master’s degree in 2011, and was ready to embark on her career.
She was nominated for a Tony
After departing Yale, Randolph hired an agent and traveled to Los Angeles to audition for a series of television pilots. But, her big break actually came back on the theater stage. Randolph earned the part of Oda Mae Brown for the 2012 Broadway run of Ghost the Musical, based on the 1990 film starring Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, and Whoopi Goldberg.
“They were looking for someone 40 or 45 [years old], so everything on paper was no, no, and no,” she told Broadway Buzz. But the much younger Randolph fit into the role just fine and received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.
Al Pacino gave her important career advice
One of the first major Hollywood stars to support Randolph in her acting journey was Oscar- and Tony Award–winner Al Pacino, whom she met in a Manhattan café during her Ghost run.
After losing her voice and struggling to fully regain it, Randolph said she felt lost and depressed when Pacino grabbed her attention and invited her to sit down at his table. After listening to a frustrated Randolph, he offered words of encouragement. “I see you, and you are exactly where you need to be. Keep climbing the ladder,” she recalled him saying in a 2019 Instagram post.
Randolph did just that, earning her first movie role in 2013’s Mother of George and soon appearing in TV shows like Selfie (2014), This Is Us (2016), and Empire (2017-18).
She was starstruck on the set of Dolemite Is My Name
Randolph’s breakthrough movie role came in 2019, when she portrayed Lady Reed in Netflix’s Dolemite Is My Name. The movie, a biographical comedy about filmmaker Rudy Ray Moore, starred Eddie Murphy in the lead role—something Randolph wasn’t aware of at her audition.
“It was a blessing in disguise because if I would have known sooner, I wouldn’t have been able to do it,” she told Vanity Fair. Randolph allowed herself two hours to be starstruck by the actor and comedian, then decided, “I’m going to get to work.”
She was “overjoyed” at The Holdovers script
Before The Holdovers, Randolph had small parts in the animated movie Trolls World Tour (2021) and the 2022 comedy The Lost City. In Mary Lamb, she found the type of multifaceted character she’d been waiting for. “I’ve felt like I had to fight for fully realized characters with complexities or even start writing or producing myself,” she told Variety. “I was so overjoyed to read this character, someone who was really struggling, but also trying to persevere in spite of her situation.”
Randolph even compared the script for the film—about a teacher, student, and cafeteria manager stuck at a New England boarding school during Christmas break—to something written by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov.
Watch The Holdovers on Amazon Prime Video or Peacock
Randolph doesn’t like watching herself onscreen
Randolph has seen her performance in The Holdovers only once and not of her own accord. She told The New York Times she was required to watch the film in order to do press requests, but that she was “very uncomfortable” the entire time. “I was quiet the whole rest of the day, I felt so naked,” she said.
Randolph says she doesn’t watch her performances because she trusts her process as an actor. “If I start watching myself, I know myself enough to know I’m going to start judging myself. I love that I can actually work from a judgment-free zone. Most actors can’t, so I’m preserving it,” she explained.
She has two major upcoming movies
After showing off her full dramatic range in The Holdovers, Randolph has signed onto upcoming projects in distinct genres. In August 2022, Deadline reported Randolph was cast in the action-thriller Shadow Force, also starring Kerry Washington and Omar Sy. A year later, the outlet revealed she joined the Rebel Wilson–led comedy Bride Hard. Neither film has a release date yet, though Deadline reports Bride Hard has wrapped production.
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