to?” Craig stared at me, waiting for the answer. “Him. Her man. Why she ain’t got a gold tooth? She needs one just like DJay’s.”
I was feeling good about Shug when I showed up to film the first scene. I had to open the front door to the messy, sweltering house she shared with two other prostitutes, a baby, and her pimp, and there was filth on top of filth and bodies on top of bodies and Shug was pregnant and hot and sweaty. Shit was about to get real. But just before Craig yelled action, I yelled, “Hold up!” I’d seen a bottle of baby powder out of the corner of my eye; I grabbed it, peeled my dress from my skin, and dumped a few puffs of the sweet-smelling dust down the front of my breasts and neck. I smacked my hands together to get rid of the excess powder and tossed the bottle back to the spot where the props guy had originally placed it.
“Okay, go!” I said, taking my place by the door.
Craig yelled, “Cut!” and burst out laughing. “You’re fucking brilliant!” he hollered.
That moment happened because Taraji was no longer in the room; Shug was. She was neither dumb nor slow; she had a backstory that mattered. She’d been abused, making her easy prey, even for a sorry pimp like DJay, but she had a bit of fight to her, like, if she got that chance, if somebody sowed a good seed in her, she would be an incredible citizen. I hid my power so that the audience could see Shug’s quiet strength anchor her ragtag family, even and especially when it seemed it was all falling to pieces.
I think this is what distinguishes me—what makes me a different kind of actress. I have the gift of being able to see what sometimes neither the creator nor the director can see. This is what an actor is supposed to do; we are not robots, but humans who, if we’re worth our salt, see beyond the page and deep into our character’s soul. I gravitate toward characters like Shug, Yvette, Cookie, and Queenie to give them some kind of royalty they wouldn’t necessarily see in their own circumstances—to illuminate them and tell their story so that the audience knows what I know. They matter.
Sometimes my characters pay me in kind.
On the same day that we filmed the death of Queenie in Benjamin Button, my cousin Daniel passed away. Understand this: losing him was like losing a rib, particularly coming as it did on the heels of my father’s death. Compounding the loss was that the day of my cousin’s January 2007 funeral was the day we shot Queenie’s funeral for the film, and naturally I was upset because I couldn’t say my final good-byes to the man I’d loved and respected. My patience was thin, and the littlest things were agitating me, particularly the prosthetics that were placed on my hands to make them look as old as Queenie was. For some reason, the prosthetic on my left hand kept lifting.
“You better come fix this!” I warned the makeup team. David Fincher, the director of Benjamin Button, was very meticulous, and if he saw even a hint of that hand being out of order, there would be problems. Still, no matter how much they fussed over that hand, it wouldn’t get right.
David had barely called it a night when I rushed to the phone to call my godmother to ask her about the funeral. “How did everything go?” I asked.
“It was beautiful,” she said, “except rigor mortis started setting in, in his left hand. They couldn’t get his hand to lie right in the casket.”
What a gift to know that Queenie allowed me and my cousin to be together one last time. Acting is communication, not only person to person, but soul to soul—a physical, emotional, and certainly spiritual expression. When I get it right, it is life itself.
10
Building Characters
When Richard Pryor was at the height of his powers, I was only a kid, so there was no way for me to understand the rhythm of his work as a humorist, writer, actor, and producer, or the nuances that danced in his jokes, which oozed attitude, and were unapologetic in their demand to look, really look, at the absurdities of our deeply complex lives. On his stage, no secret was safe. Societal wounds, formed by the shrapnel of race, poverty, misogyny, and insecurity, were ripped open