Variety caught up with Awesome Kong, who plays Tammé Dawson on the hit Netflix series GLOW, to talk season three of the series which drops August 9 on the streaming service. Kong, who’s real name is Kia Stevens, just made her return to the ring at AEW Double Or Nothing, goes into detail about how she applied her experience as a “Kong” to her role on the screen as an African-American mother trying to make ends meet for her and her college-aged son. Kong also shares about how challenging it was for her to get right into an emotional scene and exposing vulnerability.
“These are things that black women, and black people in general, had to go through in order to gain employment in the entertainment industry. We wanted to illustrate the profoundness and the extremeness of it — how far people had to go to be in the entertainment industry and how far they would go in exploiting their own people to get their foot in the door.
“She tells her son that everyone’s offensive — ‘If everybody is doing it, why can’t I do it, too?’ — and I could identify with that because in my first opportunity in wrestling I had to take on the name Amazing Kong. As you know, being black and being Kong is kind of problematic! I had to really weigh the consequences of that. As I was thinking, an N.W.A song came on, and I was like, ‘If Ice Cube and Dr. Dre can be N-word Wit Attitudes, I can be Amazing Kong. I’m going to become so successful that people will hear that name and they’ll have to respect it.’ And I also thought about King Kong Bundy, and how as a white man he was free to be a Kong. I want to have every freedom that every white person has. If that means being free to be a Kong, then I’m going to change the vernacular of what that word means.
“I took all of that experience and I applied it to what they wrote for the episode: She’s going to create a character so adored that when they see her they have respect for her. She’s a hardworking woman — she’s the polar opposite of what she’s portraying on screen — so if this is how she’s going to break into the business, she’s going to commit to that and she’s going to take it to the stratosphere.”
Stevens on going right from filming a wrestling scene to a deep emotional scene:
“The very first day of the episode we started with the wrestling and then went straight into the emotional part. Her son witnesses what is a low that contradicts the conversation I’m sure they’ve had about minstrel characters and black pride and how to hold yourself with that pride and how to deal with the double consciousness that all black people have in America. I think when she sees his face she feels shame, this real sense of, ‘Oh I did wrong.’
