‘Girls5Eva’ Star Renée Elise Goldsberry Knows Something About Dreaming Big

“Maybe it would have been better to have a bigger part,” she says, “but what I got to do was learn, to be there without the same kind of pressure. I just experienced the joy of being part of Ally McBeal, the phenomenon.”

Dreaming big in the 2020s

For Goldsberry, the comeback dream of Wickie and Girls5Eva has prompted her to circle back to her own roots in music and dig into working on her own solo album. “Sometimes life imitates art in a way that cannot be coincidence,” she says. “I did not time it this way but I, as Renée Elise Goldsberry, am in album mode.”

Goldsberry, who has a master of music degree in jazz studies from the University of Southern California and a theater degree from Carnegie Mellon, hopes the album filled with “soulful mature pop” music will cap a rich career that also includes being a concert headliner. “I get to travel around the country and do my show in concert halls all over,” she says. “It’s been a tremendously triumphant tour. I could just leave it at that. So why ask for more? It’s because I’m also a songwriter and a singer, and I have some other things to say.” And, Goldsberry adds, Wickie may just have been whispering in her ear. “If some of my character in Girls5Eva hasn’t rubbed off on me, then what is the point?” 

A different kind of midlife crisis

Credit some Wickie-whispering, but also credit the existential reboot of the pandemic that had the star rethinking her goals. “There’s no shortage of people doing that after 2020,” she says. “We had a lot of time at home to rethink our lives. We went through a collective midlife crisis.” And even amid this decade’s monumental challenges, Goldsberry says she wouldn’t trade it for any other — not even the 1990s. 

“Along the journey you gain so much,” she says. “For me, I gained a husband. I gained these two children. I get to spend this decade with them, which right now is something I wouldn’t trade for any other.” And there’s more to look forward to in the 2020s for Goldsberry: Later this summer, she’ll continue to surprise with a role on the Disney+ streaming series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. Further down the road, she has her eyes on telling the story of jazz giant Sarah Vaughan. “I’m a huge fan of hers,” Goldsberry says. “She was so successful at keeping the public out of her personal life that sometimes I worry she’s disappearing a little bit. I would like to be a part of the telling of the stories of our women heroes.”

Now that’s a hit idea.