Regina King famously began her career in television, playing teenage Brenda Jenkins in "227" for the entirety of the sitcom's run from 1985 to 1990. After that, King's first role was in director John Singleton's now-iconic "Boyz n the Hood," complementing that with a role in Singleton's followup, "Poetic Justice," where she appeared alongside Janet Jackson and Tupac Shakur. She worked with Singleton again in "Higher Learning" in 1995.

For the remainder of the 1990s, King veered between television and movie roles, but predominantly considered herself a film actor (her credits during the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s include the likes of "Friday," "Jerry Maguire," "How Stella Got Her Groove Back," "Daddy Day Care," Oscar-winning "Ray," and sequels to "Miss Congeniality" and "Legally Blonde," among other works). 

At a certain point, however, King made a strategic shift to embrace television, even as her film career heated up. The reason, she explained in an interview with The New York Times, was because she was finding the scripts better and the characters more challenging in television. "The possibility of telling more reflective stories in film could — or, you thought, would — happen more," she said. "I can't speak for every actor, but when things come across my desk to read, there are more things that are interesting in TV than movies."

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