![]() ![]() ![]() "I don't know what it's like to be a White man who grew up with money and went to Harvard," Thede says. For three summers, she toured with a puppeteer group run by her local church. By the time she was 13, she was shooting short films with a 16mm camera. (Her mother, Phyllis, later entered politics and is now a six-term representative in the Iowa General Assembly.) But Thede, who got her first name due to her father's affinity for Robin Williams, had a performative edge from a young age. Thede comes from humble roots: Her parents both worked in education, and she and her sisters grew up in a cornfield-adjacent trailer park in Davenport, Iowa, just off the Mississippi River. "This sounds like a lot," Thede says through nervous laughter during a video chat from her Southern California home, as she dons a T-shirt with the slogan "Phenomenally Black." "I work seven days a week, but it's fine because this is what I came here for -and there were many days where I had plenty of time." From humble roots and continuing to craft Black-women-fronted projects at her production company, For Better or Words. Thede's trailblazer bona fides have only grown since the critically acclaimed show premiered in 2019, with the writer-performer inking a multiyear deal to develop shows for Warner Bros. "A Black Lady Sketch Show," the first series of its kind entirely written by, directed by and starring Black women, returned for a third season of its absurdist shtick on HBO. And not only is she doing it, but she's opening the door for so many others to walk through behind her." ![]() "It really can't be overstated how difficult what she's doing is. "We do the same job of writing and performing, except she's also doing this other job, and I'm exhausted at the end of every day," adds Ashley Nicole Black, who has starred alongside Thede and Dennis in all three seasons of the show. It's kind of hard to fall asleep at the wheel because you're just full of all of this adrenaline." "Her energy is pretty contagious," co-star Gabrielle Dennis says. Once Thede is done shooting her sketches - and assessing the footage between takes - she shakes her characters, heads home to learn her lines for the next day, gets to bed around midnight and does it all again. After going over her lines on the shuttle to set, she rehearses her scenes and talks to the director about lighting, blocking and other technical touches. Since Thede appears in most of the show's sketches, the showrunner then slips into the hair-and-makeup chair while fielding questions about everything from upcoming casting to location scouting. ![]()
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