It happens to the best of us!
Angela Bassett unabashedly forgot her son Slater’s name while accepting her award for Outstanding Actress in a Drama Series during the 53rd annual NAACP Image Awards on Feb. 26.
The 63-year-old won the prestigious honor for her role on the Fox drama series 9-1-1. Bassett thanked her family for being “the penultimate support” in her life. After showering her husband and actor Courtney B. Vance with praise, fans noticed that the Black Panther star took a brief pause while attempting to remember her 16-year-old son’s name. The famous actress admittedly confessed to the hiccup during a virtual press conference after the ceremony.
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“Usually you forget your husband, right?” she joked, adding, “I went like brain dead for a second but yeah, you caught me!”
Bassett and Vance welcomed Slater and his twin sister Bronwyn in January 2006. During an interview with PEOPLE in April 2021, the New York native went into detail about how her parenting tactics are drastically different from her husband’s. As for Vance, “He is usually pretty calm but he is consistent,” she said. “For instance, right now he’s 2,500 miles or so away in Chicago and he can still get them to hop to it.” Bassett joked:
“Meanwhile, I’m 25 feet away and I either have to guilt-trip them or pull things away or just leave the room, just throw my hands up and go to my own corner and try to think of some other way to get them to do what they know they need to do.”
Bassett and Vance have both chartered down their own successful career paths in the film and television industry, with Angela gracing the big screen in films such as Malcolm X and How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Most recently, Vance appeared in HBO’s smash drama series Lovecraft Country. While acting runs strong in the family, Bassett told E-News last year that she’s been encouraging her kids to pursue a career in music. The twins were inspired after watching her voice the role of saxophonist Dorothea Williams in the animated Disney film Soul.
“They loved it. They both play the piano and rap and play guitar, so they have a little musical interest that I drill into them, that I insist upon!” she said during E!‘s red carpet coverage of the 2021 Golden Globes. “But I thought maybe they wouldn’t get into it because it’s jazz … but surprisingly they loved it. They got a lot of the themes, a lot of the ideas from it and really appreciated it.”
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