But my heart wouldn’t cooperate. It was shattered. Unbeknownst to my family and friends, I’d slipped into a deep depression, rendering me incapable of dealing with my father’s death, particularly after witnessing him pass away. Through my tears, all I could visualize was his face and the moments when he was throwing up blood. I was desperate to know if he knew how much I loved him and whether I should have told him just one more time. I was in so much pain: it seared every part of my being and I couldn’t figure out how to deal with the agony.
But God has a way of using our work to help us process our pain. Soon after my father’s death, I started production as a principal actress in the critically acclaimed feature film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button opposite Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. In the movie, set in New Orleans in 1918, I play Queenie, the lead caregiver in a nursing home. It is there that Queenie wipes behinds and fixes supper and corrals old women who “lose” strings of pearls they’re too senile to know are resting pretty on their necks, and where, too, she deals with death all day. She also makes room in her heart for a mysterious baby left on the nursing home’s stoop—an infant, born old and ugly and oddly afflicted and white. After the initial shock, the single, barren, God-fearing black woman loves that baby with the entirety of her huge heart and blinks not once at the fact that as he grows up, Benjamin is aging in reverse. Queenie, then, becomes the very embodiment of acceptance; the way she parents her adopted son gives him—and the film itself—the emotional anchor necessary for Benjamin to fully inhabit his place in the world and also to accept unequivocally those who come into his life broken, hurting, different.
The irony of my playing that role at that specific time, after I’d just finished holding my dad’s hand as he walked through death’s door, was rich. Queenie was a sort of death doula in her own right—a woman charged with helping the elderly make that long, slow, final transition. Playing her forced me to deal with death every day. I couldn’t run from it. Not as Queenie and not as Taraji.
What’s more, the way Queenie raised Benjamin mirrored the way Boris Henson parented his own child. During the most tumultuous parts of his life, my dad was a lot of things—an alcoholic, economically unstable, a domestic abuser—and he did a lot of things wrong. Still, time and again, he would show me that no matter how often you fall from grace, what matters most is how many times you get up. Through example, he showed me that we’re human—that nobody is perfect and there most certainly isn’t a rulebook for living a perfect life. Though my dad was no longer around to lead me to this thinking, the lessons he had interlaced throughout my childhood and adolescent years, the times we bonded over simple things like go-go music or blue crabs, seeped like water into the cracks of Queenie’s heart, into the reservoir of love and regard she had for Benjamin’s humanity. As hard as I tried to hide my immense sadness over his death, as diligent as I thought I was about compartmentalizing my emotions and walling off my heart so that I could deep-dive into the work, I couldn’t keep Daddy away. He was right there with me. Always there.
That’s how powerful art is. It can turn hearts of stone into pulsing mounds of mush. It can turn a raving racist into an empathetic person with the capacity to reach across divides. It can help a grieving daughter lean into a tremendous loss and, in the process, create magic.
Art uncovers the truth. My driving force is that truth; it is my full intention to breathe it into each of my characters, no matter how pretty or ugly they are, whether I agree with them or not. Maybe God put an extra dose of truth serum in my blood, but when the director yells “action” and the camera is on, I can’t lie. I have no mask. The truth manifests itself on my face—in every word I say, in every movement I make. I inhabit my character and my character me, from the top of my head to the tips of my pedicured toes. There have been times when the synergy between the two is so powerful—the energy of real life and the darkness and pain I’m channeling for the camera—that the characters creep into my dreams. It is spiritual, trance-inducing, even, if I let it move through my body honestly.
I learned how to do this in theater, where we actors don’t have the safety of second and third takes and a director yelling, “Cut—let’s try that again, except this time, do it this way.” Onstage, the audience is a living being that draws breath from our words, our movement, our inflections; it is up to us actors to reach deep inside ourselves to make every eye in the house tear up, to make every stomach push up a belly-twisting laugh, to make every heart really feel your deepest pain and your most sensual touch. In other words, we performers have to be fully available to all of our emotions—to deal with our shit in real life. If we’re missing it in real life, we’re missing it on the playwright’s or screenwriter’s page. There was no way I could bury my father in the recesses of my heart when I was charged with being a parent on camera.