A'ziah 'Zola' King says Riley Keough's extreme 'blaccent' in 'Zola' isn't exaggerated: 'That was the reality'

• A'ziah "Zola" King said Riley Keough's "blaccent" in "Zola" is simply copying "real life."
• "That's really how the girl talked," King said about the woman Keough's character is based on.
• Keough and Taylour Paige play strippers in "Zola," out now.

A'Ziah "Zola" King said that Riley Keough's "blaccent" in the film was really inspired by the person Keough's character is based on.

Keough (Stefani) and Taylour Paige (Zola) play strippers in "Zola," out now. The film is based on King's viral 2015 148-tweet thread recounting a trip she took to Florida with a girl, Jessica (called Stefani in the movie), she met while waitressing at Hooters.

In the movie, Stefani gets herself into dangerous situations while wearing colorful outfits and sporting a "blaccent." When asked if it was important for the filmmakers behind "Zola" to have Keough portray Stefani with an exaggerated "blaccent," King told Insider that Keough was simply "leaning into the facts of the story" while playing the character.

"It wasn't a 'thing,' that was the reality," King told Insider in June while promoting the film. "That's really how the girl talked in real life."

"If anyone's offended, they gotta call the real Stefani. That was her personality," she added.

"Zola" director Janicza Bravo previously said that while they didn't add Stefani's "blaccent" to the casting call while looking for an actress to play the stripper, Bravo did write the script for the movie with the "blaccent" in mind.

"The idea of her playing a 'stereotype,' the idea of her being a minstrel, it's something that I wanted," Bravo told journalist Jeandra LeBeauf in June. "But I wouldn't have put that out there because it's something that I wanted to arrive at intimately."

Bravo added that Keough was her first choice to play Stefani, especially after the actress immediately identified the character's voice in the film during the audition process.

Keough separately told Insider in June that despite never getting to meet Jessica, everything she needed to know about playing Stefani was there in Bravo's script and King's tweets.

"The character was very well-realized and I just had my interpretation of that," Keough said about playing Stefani. "Janicza wanted to go 100% in the offensive direction."

She added: "It was just figuring out what that dialect would be. I worked with a dialect coach. And then, figuring out her hair and what she would look like - how just her essence would be."