As long as you count a Daytime Emmy — and hey, Whoopi does, a girl’s gotta eat! — Jennifer Hudson is the newest member of the EGOT club as of tonight. Hudson is one of the producers of the musical A Strange Loop, which just won the award for Best Musical at the Tonys. That means she now has the complete set of awards, thanks to her Oscar for Dreamgirls, her Grammys for Best R&B Album with Jennifer Hudson and Best Musical Theater Album with The Color Purple, and her Daytime Emmy award for Outstanding Interactive Media for a Daytime Program for executive producing “an interactive fairy tale made for Oculus Quest” called Baba Yaga. When she won the Emmy, she showed off a ring with EGO engraved on it, so we can assume she is already prepared to get full EGOT-related bling.
Producing a Broadway show is secretly the go-to way to get the T in your EGOT if you’re into that sort of thing. It’s how Whoopi Goldberg got hers, for producing Thoroughly Modern Millie, and also how John Legend got his, for producing a revival of Jitney. But this is a somewhat anti-climactic end to a saga on Hudson’s part that included her performing a song from Finding Neverland at the 2014 Tonys that inspired backlash against producer Harvey Weinstein, and her Broadway acting debut in The Color Purple in 2015. Hudson did not receive a Tony nomination for that performance and then tweeted, mysteriously, that “my presence was used for my celebrity, not my talent. I’m not surprised.” Luckily, when you’re a producer, the whole point is that you actually are being used for your celebrity, not your talent, so things have all worked out for her.
