Ruby Johnson

Ruby is Dre's mother, a fixture at the family dinner table who never met an opinion she'd keep to herself. She adores her son, tolerates her daughter-in-law Bow with theatrical suspicion, and treats every gathering as a chance to hold court. Glamorous, blunt, and utterly unbothered by other people's feelings, she says the thing everyone else is thinking.

Jenifer Lewis plays Ruby at full volume and somehow makes every outrageous line land as truth rather than caricature — the comic timing is ferocious, but there's real steel and history underneath the sass. She turns the mother-in-law archetype into someone specific and unrepeatable, stealing scenes without ever seeming to try.