Malynda Hale Is Done Asking for Permission

At 40, the actress, filmmaker, singer, songwriter and activist is embracing every part of her creative identity, and building the kind of career that no longer requires anyone else's approval.

Interview by Angel Neal

Photography by: Brie Childers

Social Media @malyndahale

For much of her career, Malynda Hale was confronted with a question familiar to anyone whose ambition refuses to fit neatly inside a single box: What exactly are you? Singer? Actress? Filmmaker? Activist? Storyteller? For years, Hale tried to give the industry the kind of answer it wanted. Today, she has a different one: all of the above.

"I've never seen them as separate paths," Hale says. "Music taught me about myself, acting taught me how to step into somebody else's story, directing taught me how to shape a story with intention, and activism taught me how to take all of it and turn it toward something bigger than me."

It's a realization that feels particularly fitting as Hale enters a defining chapter of her career. Having recently turned 40, she's no longer interested in shrinking the scope of who she is to make her career easier for someone else to understand. "I think I've been a multi-hyphenate not because I was restless," she says, "but because I was looking for the room that was actually built for someone like me." That relationship between identity, belonging and legacy sits at the center of Bull Street, the drama in which Hale stars as LouEster Sadie Gibbs. For Hale, the connection to LouEster was immediate. The film, written and directed by Lynn Dow and inspired by Dow's own family history, follows a battle over something whose worth cannot simply be calculated in dollars. But it was LouEster's relationship with her grandmother, Mrs. Big-Gal, that made the character feel especially personal. "It really reminded me so much of my relationship with my own mother," Hale explains. "The fun, the laughter, the wisdom, and the protection." Then there is the land itself, and what it represents.

"LouEster is also fighting for something that has no monetary value," Hale says. "Land and legacy that is suddenly needing to be defended in a courtroom because the right paperwork was never filed. So many Black families in this country are still living that."

The role also placed Hale alongside veteran performers Loretta Devine and Amy Madigan, an experience she describes as both a dream and a masterclass. What stayed with her wasn't simply their talent, but their generosity. "Nobody was interested in being the best person in the scene," she recalls. "They were interested in the scene being good." Watching the women reinterpret text, adjust between takes and remain willing to discover something new reinforced an important lesson: longevity doesn't require ego. It requires curiosity. Hale's relationship with Devine would eventually extend beyond Bull Street, with Hale later directing the legendary actress in her own short film, Au Gratin.

Stepping behind the camera changed Hale's relationship with storytelling, and with power.

"I honestly just love being able to control what I make and being my own boss," she says. "When you're only acting, you're waiting for somebody else to decide if you're right for something, and I did that for a long time."

Directing offered her something acting alone couldn't: a view of the entire ecosystem surrounding a performance. Suddenly, lighting, pacing, framing and the choices made outside an actor's close-up became part of how she understood a story.

It made Hale a different actress, too. "Now when I act, I'm thinking about the whole frame instead of just my close-up," she explains. "It's made me a more generous scene partner and a much more patient one." That desire for creative autonomy also led Hale to establish JMV Entertainment. The motivation behind it is refreshingly straightforward.

"JMV exists because I got tired of waiting for opportunities and permission to do my own thing," she says. "At a certain point, you realize nobody is going to hand you the infrastructure, so you build it yourself." And Hale knows exactly what she wants to build.

Hollywood has long found space for Black trauma and exceptional Black triumph. Hale wants room for everything in between, the ordinary, messy, hilarious, intimate experiences that make up actual life.

"What I think is missing is ordinary Black life," she says. "There aren't enough films featuring a Black family arguing over a holiday dinner. Or a woman in her thirties who still doesn't know what she wants."

For Hale, the everyday is worthy of the screen precisely because it is everyday. When deciding whether a story deserves her energy, she asks whether it needs to exist, whether it can make someone feel seen, and whether it can normalize an experience too often treated as niche when it is actually universal. "If it checks those things," she says, "I'll fight to get it made."

Long before Hale was directing actors or building a production company, she was learning how to tell stories through music. Songwriting became her first classroom. "You sit down to write, and you don't always know what's coming, but you just follow it," she says. "That's the same thing acting needs. You have to be willing to go somewhere before you know what it looks like when you get there." Music also taught her economy. Every lyric has to earn its place, a discipline she now carries into filmmaking. Sometimes a beautiful moment still has to be cut because it doesn't serve the larger story. And sometimes a creative idea simply has to wait. Hale keeps notebooks spanning two decades. Recently, a poem she wrote at 20 finally found its way into something she's creating now. "It sat there for two decades before it finally had a home." Perhaps that is also an apt metaphor for Hale herself. The singer didn't disappear when the actress arrived. The actress wasn't abandoned when the director emerged. The activist doesn't have to overshadow the artist. Instead, each identity has been collecting tools for the next one.

Hale's willingness to engage with conversations surrounding race, identity, faith and social justice has made advocacy an important part of her public voice. But she rejects the idea that every piece of art created by a marginalized person must arrive carrying a lesson.

She already has spaces for direct commentary. Her art doesn't always have to do the same job. "Au Gratin is a comedy," Hale says. "It isn't teaching anybody anything. It's funny, specific, and true, and sometimes that's enough." That distinction matters. "The pressure to make every piece of art carry a lesson is its own kind of trap, and it mostly gets put on people of color," she says. Instead, Hale is interested in work that allows marginalized characters simply to be, without constantly translating their existence for an audience outside of their experience.

"What I actually want are stories that refuse to make marginalized people explain themselves," she says. "We've spent a long time creating work that has to justify its existence to people who weren't the primary audience anyway."

For all the audiences Hale hopes to reach, two of the people watching her journey most closely are at home: her daughters. Motherhood has added another dimension to what building boldly means. "I want them to know their voice matters without needing the world to confirm it for them," Hale says. "I want them to be proud of moving through this world as beautiful Black women." Her oldest daughter is six and already understands a simple but powerful fact about her mother: Mom makes things. Hale wants creation to feel normal to her daughters. So does taking up space.

"I spent a lot of years standing outside rooms explaining why I belonged in them, and I don't want that for them," she says. "I want them to just walk in."

It's difficult not to hear Hale speaking to a younger version of herself in those words, too.

She doesn't describe betting on herself as the biggest risk of her career. If anything, she believes the greater loss was waiting as long as she did to recognize everything she was capable of. The unconventional route, music, acting, activism, directing, producing, ultimately gave her the skills to create independently. "I kept trying to focus on one thing because that's what I was told I needed to do," Hale reflects, "but I think the path I've taken has allowed me to acquire so many skills that being able to do this on my own has made the journey much more meaningful."

Ask Hale what she wants to disrupt within entertainment and her answer comes without hesitation:"The idea that you need permission." I love that. It may be the sentence that best explains this entire era of her career. Entertainment is built around gates: the manager needed to secure the agent, the agent needed to access the audition, the credit needed to earn the meeting. Hale knows what it feels like to spend years waiting outside of those gates. So she began building alternatives.

"Every door I've walked through I either built myself or I made myself impossible to ignore," she says.

She built a production company with her husband so she could direct stories she cared about. She built platforms for conversations she didn't see happening elsewhere. And while independence hasn't necessarily created the easiest road, it has created one she can recognize as her own. "What I want disrupted is the direction of it," Hale says. "People building their own thing and making the industry come to them." That philosophy feels especially potent now. Forty isn't inspiring Hale to reinvent herself. It's inspiring her to stop editing herself. When asked to finish the sentence "Malynda Hale is entering an era where...", she doesn't need much time."Malynda Hale is entering an era where she stops asking and starts doing." After two decades of being patient, agreeable and easy to work with, Hale says turning 40 feels like the end of waiting to be recognized before moving forward. Her next chapter isn't about choosing between the artist and the advocate, between meaningful work and work capable of reaching larger audiences, or between the many titles that have followed her name. It's about finally allowing them to coexist."I want this next chapter to show people that you don't have to choose between depth and reach, or between being an artist and being an advocate," Hale says. "I'm building a body of work that holds all of it at once, because that's who I actually am." And perhaps that's the most disruptive thing Malynda Hale can do now: stop trying to find the room that was built for someone like her. She can build it herself. And I personally love that for her.