Angela Bassett Wins Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for ‘Wakanda Forever’: “I Stand Here Grateful”

Angela Bassett took home the award for best supporting actress in any motion picture at the 2023 Golden Globes for her role of Queen Ramonda in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

“We mourned, we loved, we healed, and we were surrounded every day with the light and spirit of Chadwick Boseman,” Bassett said in her acceptance speech. “This award belongs to all of us, and all of you.”

Bassett beat out Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin), Jamie Lee Curtis (Everything Everywhere All at Once), Dolly De Leon (Triangle of Sadness) and Carey Mulligan (She Said).

This nod marks Bassett’s second after she was nominated and won the Globe for best actress in a comedy or musical film for What’s Love Got to Do With It at the 1994 awards. This year, she was recognized for her role as Black Panther: Wakanda Forever‘s Queen Ramonda, a woman trying to hold her country together while grappling with the sorrow of the loss of her son, Boseman’s King T’Challa.

Backstage after her win, Bassett told reporters that Boseman was a “source of great inspiration” while they were filming the Black Panther sequel. “He most definitely was here in the spiritual with us every single day, and even when it got difficult or hard or things sort of fell apart along the way, we knew that you couldn’t sit down, you couldn’t rest,” she said. “You couldn’t give up because we had him as an example for us.”

In a previous interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Bassett also revealed that she used her actual grief over the loss of Boseman and channeled that into Ramonda’s loss of her son. “We go through hard things in life, but you’re an artist,” she said. “And if you have an opportunity to use it, you make that pain good for something, for some illumination, for audiences who sit in the dark and watch it later.”

This year marked the Golden Globes’ return to NBC after controversy engulfed the Hollywood Foreign Press Association when a Los Angeles Times article exposed that the organization contained no Black members and had engaged in suspect financial practices and unethical conduct.

Since the exposé, the HFPA has implemented numerous reforms, added 103 internationally based votes and 21 U.S.-based journalists working for outlets abroad.

“This is really not the old HFPA anymore,” the organization’s president Helen Hoehne told THR in December. “Over the past 18 months — almost two years now — we took a deep look inward and listened to the criticism. … And we built a new infrastructure that transformed our organization and the awards show into something that is more diverse, transparent and responsive.”

Jerrod Carmichael hosted the 2023 Golden Globes, which aired on NBC Jan. 10.

The HFPA, which presents the Golden Globes, is owned by Eldridge Industries. The Hollywood Reporter is owned by PME Holdings, LLC, a joint venture between Penske Media Corporation and Eldridge.