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“I’ve been wanting to do some dramatic work for a while now,” she says, standing out at the Maritime in a purple dress and a leopard-print cardigan and with exuberant hair, “but those opportunities just aren’t available for me because people see me as, you know, a wacky comedian and they think that’s all I can do.” Kim’s agent had to beg just to get her an audition for Pariah. “They were pretty skeptical,” she says, of her playing the mother, Audrey. But “later they revealed to me that they saw one angry black woman after the other, and Dee was right at the point where she was gonna rewrite the role because she felt something must be wrong with the role if nobody is getting the fact that this woman is vulnerable. And she said I brought that to the table.”

Kim, who’s been married for nine years to actor Kevin Knotts, doesn’t have kids herself. “I’m Auntie Mame,” she says. “I think it’s because I come from a huge family that I don’t feel the need. I’ve always had kids to love and to coddle. When I get tired of them, I take them back home.”

Still, she felt immediate compassion for the mother she plays. “My heart just broke for her,” she says. “Audrey’s such a sad and isolated character. Her marriage is dissolving right before her eyes, and she wants to hold onto her little daughter with her piggy tails and her pink sweaters, and she’s got this religious mind-set, so she believes that what her daughter is doing is against God. As misguided as she is, you know, Audrey loves her child. She’s trying to save her child from what she believes is pure destruction. It’s just sad!”

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