Hi everyone and thank you for tuning in to episode 65 of Awards Chatter,

the Hollywood Reporters Awards

podcast. I'm the host Scott Feinberg and on this episode I am very honored to be

joined by Deny Garira. She's an actress of stage and screen who won an obi for the play in the continuum in 2005, who made

her film debut in The Visitor in 2007, whose Broadway debut came in August Wilson's

Joe Turner's Come and Gone in 2009 and

who most famously has played the part of Me Shan on AMC's The Walking Dead

since 2009. That of course is the highest rated cable series in history. But she's a lot more

than that as well. She's also a playwright who specializes in plays about women on or from the African continent.

She co-wrote in the continuum, among other plays,

and this season has two that were warmly embraced in New York.

Off-Broadway, she had familiar, the story of Zimbabwe and parents like her own

and their kids who were born in America like Guerrero was before relocating with her family

to Zimbabwe after it became an independent country.

Meanwhile, on Broadway, she has eclipsed, a story about women during the second Liberian Civil War

that stars Oscar winner Lupita Niongo, and which was last year a sensation off-Broadway.

It has only gained momentum since its move uptown, and it is now nominated for six Tony awards,

including Best Actress in a Play for Nyongo and Best Play for Gerera.

Over the course of my conversation with the 38-year-old we talk about her personal journey

from the United States to Zimbabwe and then back again, her relationship as an artist to the

African continent, the significance of a clips being the first Broadway production ever written,

directed and performed exclusively by women and the larger

...