A difficult part of a biopic is getting viewers’ buy-in on the believability of the actor cast in the role, but Payton didn’t have that problem.
“Summer 2019, some “Wendy” watchers and Wendy’s fans started tweeting me and being like, ‘You should play Wendy Williams.’ And I’m like, ‘What? That’s so random,’” she tells ESSENCE. “I’m just going throughout my life, I’m auditioning, and people were tweeting me, ‘You should play Wendy Williams.’ And I didn’t even know that they were doing a movie about Wendy Williams.”
After season one of “The Oval,” on which Payton plays Lily Winthrop, aired on BET, the chatter about her portraying the talk show host picked up even greater steam.
“People were saying I should play her and I was like, ‘Well heck yeah, I’m going to play her.’ And so I started just watching her, pulling up anything I could pull up on her on YouTube. Every day I was watching her show. And finally in January 2020 Leah Daniels Butler, the casting director, called my agent and was like, ‘Hey, we’re casting for this movie, can Ciera come in?’ And I was like, ‘What? Look at God!’”
