If Best Actress Favorite Regina King Brings An Oscars Date, It'll Probably Be Her Son

It's safe to say that Regina King has a lot on her plate as an Oscar-nominated actress who is also building a respectable career as a producer and director. Between delivering gut-punching performance like she did in If Beale Street Could Talk and running things behind the scenes (while promising to make sure her productions hire 50 percent women), does she even have time to think about dating someone?

We love and admire her for what she's doing professionally, but sometimes we just have to indulge our basic curiosity and wonder whether Regina King also has a love life going on too. The answer, as far as we can tell, is that if she's dating someone, she's not letting the press know. So, if King ends up bringing a date to the 2019 Oscars, there's a decent chance it will be her son, who she brought to the 2019 Golden Globes, as well.

That said, she may have been on a date on February 13, when she attended the Knicks-76ers game in New York and was nearly taken out by Sixers player Joel Embiid. It's unclear who the man sitting between her and Tracy Morgan in this much-watched clip, but he didn't exactly dive to guard her with his life, so we kind of doubt that was a romantic thing.

King has spoken publicly about her love life in the past. The actress, who got her start on 227 in the '80s, was first linked to her co-star, Curtis Baldwin. And by linked to, we mean in a People profile of teen TV stars he gets jealous when a fan openly admires the 15-year-old actress.

“Can’t Regina have any fun?” her onscreen mother Maria Gibbs asks. “Not while she’s my girl, she can’t.”

In 1997, King married Ian Alexander, an actor best known for being her husband (and not the trans actor of the same name from The OA). They had a son, Ian Alexander Jr., and then divorced in 2007. It was not a pretty split, by her own account. In Essence last year, she described why she and her ex decided to do their best to become friends.

"Because of our issues, Ian was becoming the kid whose parents were so disconnected that they couldn’t even sit next to each other, let alone have a civilized conversation," she wrote in the essay, originally published in the book He Never Came Home. "I had been that kid once and it wasn’t fun."

If you believe the websites that list celebs' exes, King dated actor Nicholas Gonzalez for a minute in 2007. We've seen exactly one photo of them standing next to each other, so who knows?

Then there was the match that appeared at first to be made in '80s sitcom heaven: Regina King and Cosby Show alum Malcolm-Jamal Warner. They had been friends back in the day and finally started dating in 2011. They connected over their shared past, she said at the time. Then, sadly — and ridiculously — he apparently ended things in 2013 because he wasn't "feeling it," according to Us Weekly. The magazine also guessed years later that when King referred to being dumped on Valentine's Day, she was talking about Warner. Ugh.

King was too busy for more nonsense like that. Even once her son went off to college, she told Wendy Williams in 2015 that she hadn't really been trying to date.

"I've been so busy with work and my girlfriends are like, 'Do you think a man is just gonna go knock on the door, like, 'I'm here!'?' And I think I wish he would, but I have to make that more of a priority," King said.

Really, you don't have to, Regina. Unless there's someone out there willing and able to block you from being trampled by NBA stars?