Tonya Pinkins, star of stage and screen, has accomplished a great deal since first being cast in the original Broadway run of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along in 1981 at just 19 years old.
Other Broadway shows would follow, including Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The Wild Party, House of Flowers, Play On!, Caroline or Change and a Tony Award-winning performance for playing Sweet Anita in Jelly’s Last Jam, one of three nominations she earned on the stage.
Daytime fans first got to know her as Heather Dalton (eventually Foster) from As The World Turns, a role she played from 1983-85.
“I grew up in Chicago, which was the No. 1 All My Children city in the country, and I started watching that show from the time I was 7,” Pinkins recalls. “I always dreamed of growing up and being on that show. When I came to New York, it was one of the first shows I ever auditioned for, and I was so sure I was going to get the role, I turned down a show at Actors Theater of Louisville. The day of my screen test, they called to cancel because they had a call out to Debbi Morgan and she got the role of Angie.”
Not to be discouraged, she auditioned for two other soap operas in the following weeks, and booked ATWT, working alongside some of the top names to come out of daytime, including Meg Ryan (ex-Betsy), Marisa Tomei (ex-Marcy), Julianne Moore (ex-Frannie/Sabrina) and Steven Weber (ex-Kevin).
“We were the kids,” Pinkins says. “[Late Head Writer] Doug Marland was a great, great writer, but there was a culture there that was incredibly toxic. It was like the writers were reading all the soap mags and finding out what was going on in people’s real lives and putting that into the show. It was very tense.”
She returned to the soap world in 1991, finally getting that All My Children role, playing attorney Livia Frye for four years, reprising the role for a short time in 2003 and coming back full-time from 2004-2006.
“I was just finishing up the Los Angeles run of Jelly’s Last Jam and someone told me she was screen-testing for a role on the show, and it wasn’t anything I had heard about because I had been away from New York for a few months,” Pinkins shares. “I called my agent to see if there was any chance they would bring me in. Joan D’Incecco remembered me from that audition 20 years earlier and brought me in.”
She found a wonderful sense of camaraderie on the show and enjoyed the entire experience. A favorite moment was singing “Tonight I Celebrate My Love” as a duet with Peabo Bryson at Livia and Tom’s wedding reception; she’d also showed off her vocal talents on ATWT, most memorably when she sang “Nobody Loves Me Like You Do” with songwriter Jimmy Dunne at Betsy and Steve’s wedding.
Ann Limongello/ABC
Love Lift Us Up: In 1992, Pinkins’s AMC alter ego, Livia, wed Tom (Richard Shoberg).
Today, Pinkins is keeping her hand in all aspects of the entertainment business. She’s a producer, director, filmmaker and continues to act, most notably in Tyler Perry’s hit BET TV show Sistas, where she plays Black billionaire Miss Marie Willis. “Last May, I was down in Panama, and out of the blue, I got this offer for 12 episodes [of Sistas], and did them in four days, which is very much like the soap operas where you’re shooting 100-plus pages a day,” she notes. “I was very excited about it and they invited me back for Season 8, and I am down in Atlanta right now shooting that. This [coming] season, you will find out more about who she is and how she made her billions.”
Throughout her career, Pinkins has had memorable roles on TV shows such as 24, Scandal, Gotham and on the Hulu limited series 11.22.63, based on the popular Stephen King book. Another recent project is Pickleball is Life: Dill With It, a pilot for a series in which she plays a pickleball coach. The show is doing well in festivals, and she hopes someone will pick it up soon. “It’s the only sport I have ever played that I have been a modicum of good at because I have the worst hand-eye coordination,” she says. She’s also slated to play David Schwimmer’s science buddy on the next season of Disney+’s Goosebumps.
On the big screen, her award-winning debut feature film Red Pill, a sociopolitical horror comedy about the 2020 presidential election, was an official selection at the 2021 Pan African Film Festival and took home top honors as the Best Black Lives Matter Feature and Best First Feature at The Mykonos International Film Festival.
Pinkins was interested in being part of the horror genre in the vein of The Walking Dead or Get Out, as she was a huge fan of that world, but it wasn’t something that people were calling her for. “No one was hiring me, so I thought why not just make something and hire myself,” she says of her decision to write, direct, produce and ultimately star as Cassandra in Red Pill. She brought together a talented cast including Rubén Blades, Kathryn Erbe, Luba Mason and Adesola Osakalumi, and shot the film in just 10 days.
“Getting to build a world like that just changed my entire outlook as a creative person,” Pinkins marvels. “Building a world where you are the god of that world, and you’re determining the laws, the rules, the rights…I really loved that. I created a really great opportunity for myself to be in that chair, generating the work, rather than just being the person hired to fulfill someone else’s vision.”
Since then, Pinkins has focused a lot of her time and efforts on this new-found creative love. She directed her second film — Game Nite —another thriller starring Veanne Cox, Lisa Arrindell, Shamika Cotton and Maryam Basir, which is currently fielding distribution offers.
When Pinkins was younger, she never really considered film as part of her career journey, determined to make it in the theater world. “That was everything for me,” she notes. “When I started trying to get some of my own theater work done, it was so difficult to put something together in terms of getting a space and the people you want to collaborate with. It’s so challenging, even finding an audience.” However, she found that getting together for a week with some acting friends, it’s much simpler to shoot a film and easier to get it seen. In fact, she’s in the process of writing a new romantic thriller that she hopes to do soon.
For those hoping to see Pinkins back in the theater world, she wrote a play called Jeffrey Manor, which will have a salon presentation at the Apollo Theater in April of 2025. And while that won’t have her acting, she’s excited for people to see her vision come to life. She’s also been working with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who was recently Tony-nominated for Appropriate, on a new version of Mother Courage, and hopes to find a place to perform that soon.
Fans can also hear Pinkins regularly on her podcast, You Can’t Say That! on the Broadway Podcast Network.
But even with all that’s keeping her busy, Pinkins always tries to make time for some fun. “My priority in life is trying to visit all 195 countries and I’m up to 81,” she shares. “Every year, I try to get about 10 countries in.”
Despite her heavy roster of other endeavors, the actress remains open to returning to a soap opera, though she’s not interested in an exclusive contract that would prevent her from doing other projects. “At my age, it just feels like a leash that will keep me from doing things I want to do,” she says. “I would love to recur!”
CBS
In The Beginning: Here’s Pinkins as ATWT’s Heather opposite Julianne Moore (ex-Frannie/Sabrina).
