Dolemite Is My Name - Ruth E. Carter Interview

Eddie Murphy in, Dolemite Is My Name

Ruth E. Carter is one of the greatest living costume designers and has a shiny new Oscar to prove it!

Ruth E Carter has been creating costumes for film and TV for more than 20 years ( she has worked on every Spoke Lee movie) but for Carter, 59, who became the first black designer to win the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for her work on Black Panther, life couldn’t be sweeter.

Ruth’s Oscar winning costumes for Black Panther ( Marvel)

Carter is currently filming Coming 2 America, the long-awaited sequel to Eddie Murphy’s 1988 hit comedy. But first, there’s their sixth project together — his new movie Dolemite Is My Name, yet another multi-faceted dive into a slice of black cultural history. In an R-rated return to form, it stars Murphy as real-life legend Rudy Ray Moore, the middle-aged entertainer who found success by creating a trash-talking comedic (and later, cinematic) alter ego he called Dolemite. The action moves between the Chitlin’ Circuit of the South to 1970s Los Angeles, with an all-star cast that includes Craig Robinson, Wesley Snipes, Snoop Dogg, Chris Rock and Tony nominee Da’Vine Joy Randolph.

Part biopic, part backstage musical that goes behind the scenes of the making of Moore’s self-financed 1975 classic Dolemite, it’s a period film dressed to the nines.

To date, her costuming and design work includes most of the critically acclaimed, landmark movies of the African-American experience, from dressing Angela Bassett in What’s Love Got to Do With It and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, David Oyelowo as civil rights hero Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma and Chadwick Boseman as crusading lawyer Thurgood Marshall in Marshall. That’s aside from her longtime collaboration with Spike Lee on 14 films, beginning with School Daze and including Do the Right Thing, Bamboozled and Malcolm X. Carter’s costume design for Malcolm X and Steven Spielberg’s Amistad both garnered Oscar nominations.

I spoke with Ruth E Carter about creating the jaw dropping costumes for Dolemite Is My Name and what we can expect to see in Coming to America 2. Check out our interview below: