The road to stardom for Oscar-nominated Angela Bassett and Brian Tyree Henry leads back to New Haven

Their movies are set in Wakanda and New Orleans, but for two Oscar nominees, the road leads back to New Haven.

Two graduates of the acting program at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale received Academy Award nominations this month. Angela Bassett is nominated in the Supporting Actress category for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” Brian Tyree Henry received his Supporting Actor nomination for “Causeway.”

The 2023 Academy Awards ceremony will be broadcast on March 12. Jimmy Kimmel will host.

“I’m so thrilled for them,” said James Bundy, dean of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and also the artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre where many students get their first professional acting opportunities. “The bottom line is that both Angela and Brian have done tons of marvelous work. It’s great to see them get recognition for these roles, but it’s really a testament to their transformational abilities. It’s inspiring.”

A third graduate of the drama school, Frances McDormand, also got a nomination: not as an actress, for which she’s already won Oscars three times, but as a producer of “Women Talking.” McDormand already has a producing Oscar as well, for “Nomadland.”

Bassett and Henry both appeared on the same episode of “The Late Late Show with James Corden” earlier this month before the Academy Award nominations were announced. Henry told a story of not realizing he was supposed to prepare a song for his audition to get into the master’s program for the then-Yale School of Drama. “So when I went, I said the only thing I can do is sing the last song that I heard, and it was ‘Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee’ from ‘Grease.’”

Bundy, who’s been heading the school since 2002, and graduated from it himself in 1995, remembers watching Henry audition to get into the acting program.

Yale-trained actors have been getting Academy Award recognition for decades. Meryl Streep, who has won three Oscars and has been nominated more times (21) than any other actor, graduated from the school of drama in 1975. Among the many graduates of the program who have gone on to noteworthy film careers are Paul Newman, Sigourney Weaver, John Turturro, Paul Giamatti, Kathryn Hahn, Tony Shalhoub, Kate Burton, Liev Schreiber, Chris Noth, Henry Winkler and Maulik Pancholy.

Specifically, among Black actors, Lupita Nyong’o, Jonathan Majors, Winston Duke, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Mamoudou Athie, Sanaa Lathan, Charles Dutton, Evan Parke, Aja Naomi King and David Alan Grier all graduated from the drama school. Another grad is the Broadway and movie star Courtney B. Vance, Bassett’s husband. The couple met while they were both acting students at Yale.

Nyong’o and Duke both star alongside Bassett in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” which begins streaming on Disney+ on Wednesday.

Bassett received her bachelor’s degree in African-American Studies from Yale in 1980, and entered the drama school the following year. Yale awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2018 and the Yale Undergraduate Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020. She still attends David Geffen School of Drama alumni events, Bundy said, and “has been generous mentoring alumni at the school.”

The David Geffen School of Drama at Yale was founded in 1925 as the Department of Drama in the university’s School of Fine Arts. Thirty years later, it was reorganized as its own school and renamed the Yale School of Drama. The name was changed again last year upon receiving an unprecedented $150 million gift from entertainment industry executive David Geffen. The gift was the largest known donation of its kind to any American theater school in history and allowed the drama school to eliminate tuition fees for all its degree programs.

In its three-year acting program, the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale is largely focused on stage acting, with a year of classes devoted to the verse styles of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan playwrights, but Bundy notes that the school also offers courses for acting “on camera.”

Reach reporter Chris Arnott at carnott@courant.com.