Lauren Ridloff Honored With IMDb Fan Favorite STARmeter Award

Actress Lauren Ridloff just received the IMDb Fan Favorite STARmeter Award!

Ridloff, 43, is a Deaf actress who recently became an international sensation after appearing as the lightning-fast Deaf superhero Makkari in Marvel’s “Eternals” film, which hit theaters late last year. Although there are several Deaf characters in the Marvel comics, Ridloff became the first Deaf superhero in the live-action Marvel Cinematic Universe film franchise.

To be eligible for the award, IMDB says that a celebrity must be listed in the IMDbPro STARmeter rankings chart, which records the page views of celebrities that have more than two-hundred-million monthly visitors on IMDb. Ridloff skyrocketed through the charts thanks to her roles as Makkari in Marvel’s “Eternals” and her role as Connie in AMC’s “The Walking Dead.”

Both topped IMDb’s lists for the Top 10 Movies and the Top 10 Series of 2021, respectively.

IMDb Chief Operating Officer, NikkiSantoro, congratulated Ridloff on her award, saying that she was thrilled to “celebrate her incredible achievements” on screen.

“Lauren's phenomenal performances in everything from ‘Sound of Metal’ to ‘Eternals’ to ‘The Walking Dead’ have leaped off screens and driven fans and professionals around the world to IMDb and IMDbPro to learn more about her work,” Santoro said. “We congratulate Lauren as our newest recipient of an IMDb STARmeter Award and we are thrilled to celebrate her incredible achievements and watch her career continue to grow.”

This is far from the only award that the Deaf actress has won. She received the SAG-AFTRA Harold Russell Award at the 2020 Media Access Awards. She also received a Tony Award nomination in 2018 for her breakout performance in Children of a Lesser God.

In a video of her acceptance speech, IMDb provided captions to the video, translating her native language, American Sign Language, into English. Some hearing speakers may not be aware that the two are separate languages, with different grammatical structures and syntax.

“Thank you so much to my fans for your support and love,” Ridloff said in her acceptance speech. Ridloff filmed her acceptance speech from Georgia, where she is currently shooting the final season of “The Walking Dead.”

"I received this award because you went to IMDb and IMDbPro to learn more about me and the incredible projects that I've been fortunate to be a part of,” she added.

“What Black actor inspired me and my career?” she continued. “I would have to say Phylicia Rashad. I grew up watching her on the screen portraying the cool, calm, and wise Mrs. Huxtable. When I started my career on Broadway, my director Kenny Leon talked to me about Rashad, and her acute ability to play seven different degrees of anger. That sunk in, stayed in my head. I knew that Rashad was brilliant at what she did.”

“It was as if everything came full circle one night,” she continued. “After I finished a show, Rashad came into my dressing room to tell me how moved she was by my performance. That moment inspired me to keep on doing what I do now.”

“If you look at my IMDb acting credits, the first thing you’d see is ‘If You Could Hear My Own Tune,’” she went on, referring to the 2011 film. “That’s the film where I play Fatima, the best friend of the lead. I remember at that time I had just moved from LA to NYC and did not have any intentions to act, but to help a friend. This friend was a Black, Deaf filmmaker named Ann Marie Bryan who asked me to fill in a role.”

“And through this experience, I learned that, even though I was new to NYC, there was a Black, Deaf community,” she continued. “I learned the value of having a community within the acting world. That brings me to my advice for new actors: find your acting community. They are there to support you.”

She closed out her acceptance speech with a message to her fans: “Thank you for the honor.”