Many actors have several key roles in their careers, but Erika Alexander is one of the rare ones who’s had the role of a lifetime. Thirty years ago, she stepped into the character of Maxine Shaw on Living Single — a now-iconic attorney character inspired by her role models Cicely Tyson, Phylicia Rashad, Whoopi Goldberg and Hillary Clinton. In the years since, she’s been part of significant projects like Get Out and Wu-Tang: An American Saga. But American Fiction, she says, is the crown jewel of her portfolio.

“It’s been very healing to be in this movie,” says Alexander, 54. She plays Coraline, a divorcée who begins a relationship with Jeffrey Wright’s Monk, a novelist so frustrated with the publishing industry’s penchant for stereotypically “Black” books, he submits an absurdist manuscript to prove a point. “We’ve been having conversations like those in the movie for a long time,...