Actress Tika Sumpter is no stranger to television. For six years, she’s starred as Layla Williamson in ABC’s daytime soap One Life to Live. She also appeared in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Salt (2010), and Stomp the Yard 2 (2010), and she’s done some modeling, voice overs, and commercials.
More recently, she’s made a transition to primetime with guest stints on Gossip Girl and The Game.
But like many women in film and television, her roles do necessarily show what she is fully capable of as an actress. In both shows, Sumpter plays a rich and powerful male character’s eye/arm candy.
In Gossip Girl, the lucky guy is Chuck Bass, a wealthy business man in charge of his late father’s company. In The Game, Sumpter is girlfriend to pro-football quarterback Malik Wright.
Of course guys need significant others on film/television… But let’s just hope that Tika Sumpter and other women get primetime and feature roles that test their range and not squeeze them into that girlfriend-wife-sexual-fantasy-box.
A Queens, NY native, Sumpter shared some fun film and television facts about herself on her website:
Favorite Movies
Cinderella, Crash, Norma Rae, Any Paul Newman Movie and Fight
Club
Favorite TV show
The Amazing Race, Girlfriends, Nip/Tuck
Actors I admire
Don Cheadle, Paul Newman, Matt Damon, Kiera Knightly, and Charlize Theron
Film role for the opposite sex I would most want to play
James Bond
And check out Sumpter on Gossip Girl!
Daimn! She’s a hottie. Where have you been all this time girl? I am glad the industry is beginning to see what I see right now. Good stuff.
She is hot. But talking about range. I mean the thing is it’s difficult. Movies are more so portrayals of us than anything else. I have seen many basketball players date girls, all kinds of girls. I just never came around a women’s basketball player who even wants to date a hot guy let alone any guy. So I feel like the way it is in society is how they have it in the movies.
But talking about it I feel like I am re-hatching the chicken and egg debate. Which came first? The marginalization of women in society or that in film. I feel the former came first and until that changes, nothing is, and there goes the range of women actresses.
True. I don’t see no ‘powerful’ women dating younger guys or any guy. There you go! Society is what it is. It seems the guys are more flexible so the women are stuck in these tiny range roles. And this becomes evident in the movies as the play the so called girlfriend-wife-sex object kinda roles. It’s partly because that’s just the way we see it out here in life.
Well aren’t you saying these things because you are guys and your point of view is kind of narrow?
Well. Yah! I said that. What would you say?