KiKi Layne Always Wanted to be a Princess
Photography Brad Torchia
Styled by Alison Edmond
It’s a dream many young girls raised on fairytales and Prince Charmings can remember. But when you’re Black, it’s one that can also feel intimidatingly far out of reach. It’s no wonder that the actress, born Kiandra Layne, holds the Robert Iscove film adaptation of Cinderella so close to her heart. Released in 1997, when Layne was only five years old, the film was the first time the actress remembers “seeing” herself on screen—through the eyes of an 18-year-old Brandy, playing a Black version of the classic Charles Perrault heroine.
Some two decades later, Layne is finally playing a princess of her own. In Coming 2 America, the sequel to the classic ‘80s comedy starring Eddie Murphy as Prince Akeem of the fictional African nation Zamunda, Layne plays Meeka, the eldest daughter of a now much older Akeem. As Akeem prepares to step into his role as Zamunda’s king, so too does Meeka as its princess.
Arriving more than 30 years after the original, the just-released film largely revolves around Akeem’s crowning as King, and—in the absence of any known male heirs—his grooming of Meeka to one day follow in his footsteps and rule as Queen. However, a wrench is thrown in both of their plans when Akeem finds out that he actually has a long-lost son living somewhere in America. Beholden by Zamundan law, Akeem is pressured into shifting his efforts toward his male descendant. Meanwhile, Meeka, a fierce warrior with a determined sense of feminist resolve, is forced to watch her dreams dissipate as she confronts a system built on outdated sexist norms. “Just getting to play an African princess was already amazing,” Layne tells L’OFFICIEL about the role. “But Meeka also has so much strength and integrity. She gets to kick some ass. Just representing another strong Black woman on screen, representing Black royalty and beauty and excellence—I was so drawn to that.”
It’s a Tuesday afternoon in mid-February and Layne is sitting at a table in her Los Angeles home, dressed fashionably in one of Pyer Moss’ instantly covetable oversized scuba T-shirts. (Supporting Black designers has become important for the actress, who’s made a habit of requesting their clothes alongside “the Diors, the Pradas, the Guccis, and all of that.”) Outside, several trucks are making a distracting amount of noise. “I guess it’s garbage day, y’all,” she jokes at one point, as a loud honk cuts her off. “Don’t y’all know I’m working in here?”
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1991, Layne started studying drama at a performing arts school when she was only seven. She later attended The Theatre School at DePaul University before graduating with a BFA in 2014 and hustling in the Chicago theater community for several years. By 2015, Layne had landed a starring role in Veracity, a short about a popular student who is ostracized after being outed as queer by her classmates, and in 2016, she appeared in the original pilot of Lena Waithe’s Showtime hit The Chi.
Still, her official start in Hollywood wouldn’t come until 2017, when Barry Jenkins cast Layne as the lead in his Moonlight follow-up, an adaptation of James Baldwin’s gripping love story If Beale Street Could Talk. She played Tish, a 19-year-old who finds out she’s pregnant right as her boyfriend is imprisoned after being falsely accused of rape. Thanks to Jenkins’ recent Oscar win for Moonlight and an all-star cast that included Regina King, Stephan James, Colman Domingo, and Teyonah Parris, Beale Street deservedly attracted attention—and with her intricately layered performance presiding over it all (Layne’s narration is heard throughout), the actress emerged from the other side a bona fide star.
In the wake of the film’s success, the young starlet was immediately thrust into the spotlight, a “pretty insane” experience she’s still processing several years later. “It was a weird thing. It was everything that I dreamed of and everything that I worked so hard for,” she lets off. “But also, it was like, Oh, this comes with some shit that I had no idea was a part of it.” The “shit” mainly entailed a seemingly endless press cycle that often forced one project to bleed right into the next. “I definitely got caught up in the whirlwind,” she explains. It’s why the pandemic-induced quarantine was a blessing in disguise for her. “I’m grateful for the time it gave me to sit my butt down,” she admits. “Two thousand and eighteen to 2019 was pretty crazy. I definitely needed that time last year to just sit still, recalibrate, and check in. I definitely learned some hard lessons about what it means to take care of yourself and check in with yourself, to make sure that I'm not sacrificing too much of my spirit to serve everything that's happening for me career-wise.”
Layne quickly followed Beale Street with a role in Native Son, where she plays Bessie, the girlfriend to the film’s troubled protagonist Bigger, played by Ashton Sanders. Coincidentally, Sanders was the breakout star of Jenkins’ Moonlight, a bit of casting that would feel borderline cosmic if not for the actors’ previous connection. “Ashton and I knew each other from DePaul, actually,” Layne responds when asked whether the pair bonded over their mutual experiences working underneath Jenkins. In fact, she went to Sanders for advice before going in for her Beale Street chemistry read. “Just do the work, man. You do the work and you’re going to be good,” Layne recalls him telling her. When Jenkins called her to let her know she had booked the role, she immediately told the director, “I’ve got to call Ashton!” (Jenkins, understandably, forbade her from doing so, saying, “No. Don’t call anybody. You can’t call anybody yet.”)
After those films, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Layne embark down a path of eternal indie dramas, where she’d continuously be casted as the partner to some man embattled by psychological demons. But Layne has ensured such would not be the case. “When I had representation meetings I made it clear. ‘Y'all are not just going to send me out for the stuff that's just for the black girl. I will not accept that,’” she remembers telling her agents. “I've been intentional about not being put into a box and about representing Black women and creators in Hollywood. I love breaking out of the stereotypes and assumptions of what type of stories it makes sense for a Black body to be seen in.”
This philosophy certainly extends to her last film, The Old Guard, a big-budget superhero action flick about a group of immortal mercenaries. Directed by Love & Basketball’s Gina Prince-Bythewood, the movie stars Charlize Theron as Andy, the de facto leader of the immortal crew. Layne, meanwhile, plays Nile Freeman, a dedicated Marine who dies after her throat is brutally slit by a military target, only to inexplicably come back to life—her throat miraculously healed. The critically-acclaimed film hinges on the complicated relationship between Andy, a jaded, no-nonsense crime-fighter, and Nile, a diligent soldier who understandably gets hung up over her impromptu discovery that she can never truly die. Unsurprisingly, the two powerhouse actresses—Layne, an action newcomer; and Theron, a veteran Layne credits with “paving the way in terms of representation for women in the action genre”—made it all work.
Layne got the call to audition for Coming 2 America while still on set for The Old Guard, but after months immersed in a world of hard-hitting action sequences, she needed some mild adjustments before taking on the comedy. First up was nailing an African accent, for which she looked to another fictional African nation: Wakanda. “By that point I had watched Black Panther so much that at my audition to be the Princess of Zamunda I was sounding like a true Wakandan,” she recalls with a chuckle. Luckily, the transition was a welcomed one. Filming The Old Guard had been arduous, requiring “heavy training” to get into believable shape for an immortal soldier. And though Layne certainly didn’t complain about her elevated level of fitness, she’s quick to admit that the Coming 2 America set—where she was surrounded by Black comedy legends like Murphy, Arsenio Hall, Tracy Morgan, and Leslie Jones—was a reprieve. “And truthfully, stepping into a bit more glam felt nice as well,” she adds. “On set, I said, ‘Oh, I forgot how much I miss lashes!’"
She was particularly fond of her wardrobe, especially since it gave her the opportunity to work with cinema virtuoso Ruth E. Carter. “I mean, it was insane from the first conversation that I had with Ruth,” she says, making no effort to conceal her giddiness about the Oscar-winning costume designer. She praises Carter for just “getting” the character of Meeka, who “loves her country” but also understands that “some of those traditional things are holding her back from being what she dreams of being and what she rightfully deserves to be.” She liked how that “cool sense” was reflected in the costumes. “You see that break from tradition,” she explains. “Some of Meeka’s nose jewelry, her chains, all that stuff. These unique cuts. It was beautiful storytelling.”
For Layne, the original Coming to America was a cultural touchstone. (Half-joking, she references a now-iconic Kanye West quote, rhetorically asking, “If you haven’t seen the first Coming To America, I am really judging you. How, Sway?! How have you not?”) And getting the chance to appear in its sequel is not only a dream come true for her, personally, but something she’s happy to share with her family, as well. “My family has their own very personal connection to the original film,” she tells me, adding that it was her eldest brother’s favorite movie of all time. “They’re just so excited. They don’t even know what to do with themselves.”
After the laugh-out-loud comedy, Layne will enter psychological thriller territory for Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, and in the near future, she’ll take a stab into body horror when she begins filming Ring Shout, Kasi Lemmons’ television adaptation of P. Djèlí Clark’s novella. Playing Maryse Boudreaux, a young woman tasked with fighting “Ku Klux” demons using her magic sword, Layne’s first foray into serialized television has all the makings to be the next Lovecraft Country thanks to its genre take on the United States’ sordid history with racism. The actress was drawn to it because of its focus on the psychological effects of seeing Black people unceremoniously murdered everyday—a phenomenon all too relevant in the recent wake of the back-to-back murders of unarmed Black citizens like Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor.
It’s at this point that Layne returns to her connection to the aforementioned Cinderella—the first time she really saw that “little Black girl” represented on screen. “Brandy as Cinderella, as this princess, and Whitney Houston as the Godmother—I think the overall diversity that was in that film went over a lot of our heads,” she says. (She thanks Disney for finally adding the film to its namesake streaming service.) “That was probably the first time I watched a film and just…” She briefly pauses. “The braids! The brown skin! The singing! Just the beauty of it all.”
With everything she has in the pipeline, Layne will undoubtedly be to some other little Black girl what Brandy was to her all those years ago—proof that you can be anything you want to be, whether that’s an immortal superhero, a magic sword-wielding, demon-slaying resistance fighter, or—to keep it simple—an African princess.
HAIR Larry Sims
MAKEUP Rebekah Aladdin
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY Brad Torchia
EDITOR Molly O’Brien
PRODUCTION Viewfinders
