Taraji P. Henson and Naomie Harris sit down with The Hollywood Reporter for their annual Actress Roundtable where they discuss the struggles black actors face in Hollywood and how they prepared for their new roles in Hidden Figures and Moonlight. Get the highlights inside….
Taraji P. Henson and Naomie Harris land the cover of The Hollywood Reporter’s newest issue to celebrate their annual Actress Roundtable discussion. Actresses Emma Stone, Natalie Portman, Amy Adams, Annette Bening, and Isabelle Huppert join the YBF leading ladies for a candid discussion about present-day Hollywood.
As Tinseltown works on being more inclusive and sharing more diverse stories, or at least tries to appear to be working on it, there’s still work to be done. But Taraji prefers to look at it differently, peering through a more optimistic viewpoint. She says she tries not to look at the injustices in Hollywood as just a race issue and that she would rather tackle issues in Hollywood with her work ethic.
She tells THR:
“It's always hard. I have white friends, blond hair, blue eyes, who ain't worked in five years. Have we seen enough representation of African-American stories? No. But has Hollywood been horrible to me? No. I've worked. Did I get paid what I deserve? That is the question we should be talking about. But I can't take that on because I have worked and I've seen my career do this. So I never wallow in the muck and say, "Oh, it's hard." That's a given. I can't take this skin off. We know what the deal is. You understand? So I'm not going to make it an issue. I'm going to work my ass off and hopefully the work that I'm doing will change things, will make it better for the next one coming behind me. You let me in, give me an inch, I'll take a mile. I've come a long way. I mean, look at me now. I'm on a hit show, I just produced my own variety show for Christmas, and I watch TV and I go, "Wow, they're saying, 'Taraji.' Not ‘Taraji P. Henson,’ but ‘Taraji's White Hot Holiday.’ (Laughs.) See, I'm white, really. I'm not black!”
The 46-year-old actress, who stars in the biographical drama Hidden Figures, reveals the fears of telling the story of someone still alive today and how she always kept mathematician Katherine Johnson in the back of her mind when she was working on the project.
“It's scary when they're so alive and their family is still alive,” Taraji said. “It's a big pressure, because you want to get it right. And that's all I cared about. Can we just make sure Katherine [Johnson, now 98] is happy? This is her story. We are riding on her shoulders right now. And I owe her the truth and all of me. I got to sit with her and started studying her mannerisms, and I asked her a lot of questions. What I did find that was parallel in our lives was math, which I hated. I was not wired that way. And I think it was because as girls we were told math and science was for boys, so I guess I believed that.”
Peep a clip of her discussion below:
British beauty Naomie Harris opens up about why she was hesitant to play a crack addict in the film Moonlight, revealing she never really wanted to play a character that portrayed black women in a bad way.
“I was, because I grew up with very strong, intelligent, powerful women, and I don't feel as though they are reflected enough. So I made it my mission that I was going to make my choices based on portraying positive images of women in general and black women in particular. And I didn't feel a crack addict fit into that. But then [director] Barry Jenkins asked me to play his mum, basically, and I thought, 'Here's someone who is emotionally invested in ensuring that this character is given her full complexity and her full humanity.'"
We’d like to note, Naomie shot all of her scenes for the film in THREE days due to issues with her visa.
Check out a clip from her conversation below:
Tune in to the full roundtable when it airs on Sundance TV January 29, 2017.
Photos: Austin Hargrave via THR