Olivia Charmaine is the founder and CEO of Black Monarch Entertainment, a media production company. Charmaine’s purpose with Black Monarch is to give a voice to marginalized communities, to creators and artists that sit in the intersections of these communities, but also to audiences. She aspires to help create a more authentically diverse media industry, where not only diverse faces can be seen on-screen but are actually included by working behind the camera and in decision-making processes.

Recently, Olivia stepped in from behind the camera to the front for her new, weekly Instagram talk show named ‘the Tea’. For the Instagram show, she is joined by a celebrity every Tuesday at 11 am EST to sit and talk while drinking tea. Her purpose for ‘the Tea’ was to allow the interviewees to be themselves authentically and for audiences to see their favorite people being themselves and having a thoughtful and rewarding pause from a platform where shallow content can prime. Oliva has interviewed big names in the industry such as Janelle Monae (Hidden Figures, Moonlight) Angelica Ross (American Horror Story, Pose), and Lexi Underwood (Little Fires Everywhere). You can find all of ‘the Tea’s episodes on Olivia’s Instagram.

Switching the roles once again, Olivia stopped being the interviewer for some minutes and became the interviewee for a chat with us. Below, you can find the full interview.

Can you tell us about your motivation for starting your company, Black Monarch Entertainment?

Yes of course. So, it was multifaceted, I will say that I’ve been in the entertainment industry in some capacity my whole entire life and I got to the point where I realized that I had the time, the money, the energy, the resources to really pour into myself and to really try being an entrepreneur. I’ll also say that I started the company during the pandemic, and it was just really time of introspection and reflection. I think a lot of people did a lot of career moves during that time. So, I would say that the pandemic had a big part to do with that as well.

As your own CEO now, how do you ensure there’s no performative representation, but an authentic one? What would you suggest to other industry users to change this reality?

Yeah, that’s a great question. So, my motto at Black Monarch is work for people of color and colorful people, and I think colorful people really encompasses any other type of minority group, whether we’re talking about race, age, sexuality, gender, ability, and for me I think performative ally ship is a Band-Aid on an issue, a Band-Aid on an open wound I will say that’s been oozing for decades in this industry, but I will say that I want diversity inclusion to be baked into the heart of my company, and I think companies at large. When it comes down to media and entertainment, there’s such an opportunity to push cultural conversations and shine a light and a mirror and be a reflection of society and individuals. And I think that it’s really, really critical that the media that we’re creating is reflective and representative of who the people are, they’re actually watching it. So, as I said, I think that performance allyship, if that’s the least that we can get, I appreciate it, but at the end of the day I think that the real change comes when there are diverse people behind the scenes as well, not just, you know, in front of the camera.

Can you tell us about your ‘the Tea series’ that you’re doing on Instagram right now?

Yeah. So, ‘the Tea’ is another is another project of mine that I started during the pandemic. It started for two reasons. So, it started for one reason because this is an unprecedented time of isolation, and I was starting to feel– lonely is not the word but I would say, I am someone who, as I said, I have a lot of friends and I’m typically a social butterfly, I’m someone who especially in the industry goes to a lot of events and all of that came to a screeching halt. So, part of it was to keep up with friends and just and just check in, but the other part of the reason why I started ‘the Tea’ is because I hated Tuesdays. I know that’s uncommon, and a lot of people hate Mondays, but I don’t mind Mondays, I think you have that momentum coming in from the weekend but Tuesday’s was the day of the week where I felt like something always kind of went wrong for me even when I was in high school and college that’s when I always had like the heaviest workload or something like that. So, I started them on Tuesdays at first, because I wanted to have a brighter spot in my week to really just look forward to. And it’s really, it’s really just grown, you know the tea is a show where I sit with one or two or three people, and they’re pretty notable figures, and we have intimate conversations over a cup of tea. We talk about things like their careers and how they got to be where they are. We talk about wellness and self-care, especially because of COVID, as I said it’s a time of isolation, so I really like to talk about how people are staying grounded. We talk about pop culture and current events. But yeah, the community has really grown, and it’s been really interesting how many people love seeing their favorite celebrities with their hair down, so to speak.