We Create The Culture

Lena Waithe is simply telling the stories that she knows best. The difference is that, suddenly, everyone wants to listen.

- Allison P. Davis

SILVER LAKE’S LAMILL COFFEE SHOP is crowded for a late afternoon, just a few days after Christmas. The sleek black tables are dotted with white cups and plates and laptops open to Final Draft or some other screenwriting program. The gaudy, metallic-teal leather chairs are full of attractive people who look like they’ve answered a casting call: Extras needed for café scene, male or female, age: late-20s/mid-30s. Any ethnicity (but predominantly white). Talent should look hip; tattoos preferred.

It’s the perfect scene for actress and writer Lena Waithe to walk into, wearing a vintage Tales From the Hood T-shirt, tapered heather-red Nike sweats, and sneaker head-approved Nikes. And not just because she’s a screenwriter in fashion joggers in a coffee shop during working hours, or because this could easily be a Los Angeles– based episode of Master of None, the Netflix show she appears on as Denise, a black lesbian sneaker head who dispenses love advice to Aziz Ansari’s hapless Dev. It’s because, after writing an Emmy- winning episode for the show’s second season, Waithe is the person you’d want to imagine the inner lives of every mustachioed barista and blunt-bobbed vintage-store owner currently in the shop. She’d take these stock characters and imbue them with nuance and life and humor. She’d probably get a series order and maybe even pick up another Emmy.

After she grabs a lavender lemonade, Waithe joins me at a table and looks over the room for a moment.

“Okay, how many stories could you write about the people in this room?” I ask.

“Oh, a million,” she says. “I’ve always been more interested in exploring the lives of these people that I see on the street. You know what I mean?”