'A League of Their Own' 's Chanté Adams Says Angela Bassett Is Her Greatest Acting Inspiration

Mar. 15, 2025

Photo: Michael Kovac/Getty; Arturo Holmes/Getty

Chanté Adamsis a star on the rise — but there’s one actress, in particular, who inspired her to continue striving for greatness in the acting space.

“I auditioned for a play my freshman year, first day of high school, only because my friend was auditioning and I didn’t want to be left alone and look lame. So I was like, ‘I’ll just go with you and wait for you,'” Adams, 27, explains. “And then my drama teacher was like, ‘If you’re going to wait here, you have to audition.’ And I was like, ‘All right, girl. Give me the lines.’ So I read the lines, and then the next day, my name was on a cast list to do a play.”

Adams, who went on to earn her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, has been acting ever since. But without hesitation, she tells PEOPLE that acclaimed actressAngela Bassettinspired her to want to continue down this path even more.

Dalvin Adams

“Iconic,” Adams says of Bassett, 63. “Justwatching her inWhat’s Love Got to Do With It, I just remember the moment so vividly. I was sitting on the Megabus on my way to New York, and they were like, ‘Have you ever watchedWhat’s Love Got to Do With It?’ I was like, ‘No.'”

Seeing Bassett’s performance helped shift her perspective on what she wants for her own acting career.

“I watched that movie and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s what I want to do. I’m going to do that,'” she recalls. “I want to make people feel the way that she made people feel.”

In addition to Bassett, Adams is also a bigRegina Kingfan: “I feel like those two are my main people that I’m just absolutely obsessed with.”

Adams, so far, has been able to bulk up her résumé with a lot of her “dream roles.” She starred as rapper Roxanne Shante in Sundance Film Festival hitRoxanne Roxanne, and opposite PEOPLE’s2020 Sexiest Man AlivetitleholderMichael B. JordaninA Journal for Jordan. She has also appeared inMonsters and Men,VoyagersandThe Photograph.

“God shows out before I get that chance to quit,” she says. “While I’m working and I’m on set for 16 hours a day for five to six days out of the week, there have been times that I’m like, ‘I would rather be doing anything else at this point.’ But then I realize that a lot of people have this dream, and I’m just one of the lucky ones that are able to actually live it. And so I just go back to that space of gratitude, and I’m just like, ‘I can handle this.'”

Anne Marie Fox / ©Amazon / Courtesy Everett Collection

Next up, Adams is hitting the baseball field for Prime Video’sA League of Their Ownreboot. She stars as Max Chapman — a queer Black woman in the 1940s with aspirations to be a professional baseball player.

“Max, she’s fighting a war on three fronts,” she explains. “Especially in the 1940s of being Black, queer and a woman. And also add in the fact that she’s trying to play baseball. But the fact that she is very determined to do whatever it takes in order for her to accomplish her dream, which is to get on a team and to be able to play baseball with like-minded individuals, I think that should inspire every human who watches the show to go after it and do the damn thing.”

“Even though you might get a lot of nos, you’re not getting a never,” she adds.

The remake — which comes 30 years after the 1992 film starringGeena Davis,Tom Hanks,MadonnaandRosie O’Donnell— uniquely explores Max’s own experience to that of star/co-creatorAbbi Jacobson’s character Carson Shaw, which is vastly different due to race.

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“It’s not the story of the All-American Professional Girls Baseball League. It’s a story about a generation of women who played baseball, and there were more than just white women that did that,” says Adams, whose character is based on three real-life Black female baseball players: Mamie Johnson, Toni Stone and Connie Morgan.

“It’s important to include women of color into that narrative, into that story, as well, because we are trying to make a very authentic representation of that time period,” she continues. “And so yeah, we couldn’t just make a story about white women in baseball. That’s been done already.”

A League of Their Ownpremieres on Aug. 12 on Prime Video.

source: people.com