If the end of groundbreaking US legal drama The Good Fight has come too soon for fans of its subversive ripped-from-the-headlines plots, spare a thought for Zimbabwean-Australian actor Charmaine Bingwa.

The Perth-raised recipient of the 2018 Heath Ledger Scholarship, awarded in LA to emerging Australian actors, was just starting to peel back the layers of her on-screen alter ego, the enigmatic, obsessively driven first-year law associate Carmen Moyo.

“It’s really hard to say goodbye so soon to a character I’ve loved so much,” says Bingwa from South Africa, where she is filming another soon-to-be-announced series. “The Kings [creators Robert and Michelle King] have written a very satisfying ending for Carmen, and we get to find out so much more about her, which is great.”

Bingwa is the first openly gay person and woman of colour to win the prestigious Heath Ledger Scholarship and she is committed to telling more of the progressive queer stories she explored in her series Little Sista, which won the 2017 LGBT Toronto Film Festival.

“It’s important for me to tell any minority stories,” says Bingwa. “So whether it be as a person of colour, or as a person of colour from a different country, but also to tell queer stories. Given a platform as a queer person, I think its incumbent on you to do that. We’re finally starting to expand what queer stories are. When I was coming up, I was one of the reviewing members of the Sydney Mardi Gras film festival, Queer Screen, and I loved seeing the evolution from the tragic coming-out story to just living and thriving.”

As an Australian in Hollywood, Bingwa feels she is “riding on the shoulders of legends, like your Naomis, your Nicoles, your Russells, and obviously Heath”. When she first moved to LA, Bingwa spoke exclusively in “standard American” for seven months, even during phone calls home to her mum. Since then, she has learnt to speak Spanish for The Good Fight and has mastered a Rwandan accent for 2021 genocide film Trees of Peace.

For upcoming Will Smith movie Emancipation, Bingwa immersed herself in the role of a slave during the American Civil War. Directed by Antoine Fuqua (The Terminal List), the film tells the true story of “Whipped Peter”, a man who fled slavery, a photograph of his scarred back pivotal evidence of the brutality of the South.

“It’s such a profound story and we filmed in an actual plantation,” Bingwa says. “I don’t think I’ve ever researched something so thoroughly in my life. I really wanted to hear the stories from our people’s mouths. So I listened to well over 120 hours of enslaved narratives, which is quite a lot on the soul, to listen to how people suffered. But I went as deep as I possibly could for this project. It’s so important to me, and, I think, to everyone.”