Taraji P. Henson Is Tired of Fighting
Before things started to click for Taraji P. Henson, she sought career counseling from the man upstairs.
“I had a talk with God a long time ago when things didn’t pop,” she said. Invoking the women she had watched as a child, like Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball, Bette Davis and Diahann Carroll, she told him, “I want longevity and work that matters.”
This, Henson has had: At 53, she is an Oscar-nominated actress with a long career that includes films like “Hidden Figures,” “Hustle & Flow” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” She also spent six seasons playing the music industry matriarch Cookie on the Fox series “Empire,” a juicy role that netted her a Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award.
But she is candid about the frustrations she still faces in an industry that undervalues Black actresses. “The fact that I made it through is a blessing because a lot has happened,” she said, noting that she had to step away from work last year when things got to be too much. A monthlong trip to Bali in Indonesia helped to recenter her, as did attending to her successful beauty brand, TPH.
“I have a brand now, so I have other things to pay the bills,” she said. “Because the way I’m getting paid in Hollywood, I sure won’t be retiring off these sorry checks.”
In mid-December, I met Henson at a hotel restaurant in Beverly Hills to discuss “The Color Purple,” a new big-screen take on the Alice Walker novel, inspired by the stage musical and directed by Blitz Bazawule. In the film, Henson plays the fabulous and well-feathered blues singer Shug Avery, whose confidence inspires abused Celie (Fantasia Barrino-Taylor) to find her own voice and even, for a potent moment between the two women, to know love.
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Henson had been offered the same role when “The Color Purple” was on Broadway but turned it down for fear of how demanding the production would be: “Eight shows a week, and Shug sings gospel, blues and jazz — that’s a lot.” She still found the material daunting when signing on to the new film, but it thrilled her to push through that fear to make the character her own, drawing inspiration from close to home.
“Whenever you seeing me playing these Southern women, know that I’m my grandma,” Henson said. “My grandmother’s still very much a lady with her pearls and her clothes, and she’s very conscious of how she looks when she goes out still: She goes to the salon and gets her hair done, gets her nails done. And she raised nine children on a sharecropper’s income!”
Henson is proud of the work she put into the film, but she had to fight to get cast and be paid her worth, and her spirit is still sapped from all that negotiating. She noted that at least she had one of the producers of “The Color Purple,” Oprah Winfrey, in her corner, but these are battles she’s had to wage alone too often.
“It hurts my feelings when it’s not reciprocated, but I know this world is cold and nobody really cares, and you got to go out and fight for what you want,” she said. “What else do I need to do to prove my worth? Now that I’m singing and dancing for you, and I climbed up on the table 88 times with my knobby knees and had to ice my knees in between takes, what else do I need to do?”
Taraji P. Henson Is Tired of Fighting originally posted on nytimes
