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 and poked at under his harsh, unrelenting spotlight, and the characters he portrayed onstage—junkies, monsters, old southern gentlemen, hustlers, lovers, even Richard Pryor himself—screamed out in agony but told their tales anyway, always with a biting humor that made the audience laugh and think and feel. Pryor was an incredible entertainer and arguably the world’s greatest comedian, but he was, above all else, a stellar storyteller who believed in exposing the truth.
I wasn’t ready for Richard Pryor’s truth the first time I saw him on the big screen. My father took me to his 1982 concert movie, Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip, the first big comeback stand-up routine he’d done after nearly burning himself alive in a drug-and-alcohol mishap two years earlier. I was twelve.
To be fair to my father, I did beg him to let me see it. I was raised on a steady diet of comedy—my adoration for the on-screen shenanigans of Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball, Goldie Hawn, and the like knew no bounds—and Richard Pryor, a significant stroke in the pop-cultural landscape of my childhood, was a part of that pantheon of comedians that I respected, even if my mom wouldn’t let me see most of his films. Mommy took those R ratings seriously, so she wasn’t about to buy her preadolescent daughter movie tickets to see Pryor flicks like Bustin’ Loose, Stir Crazy, Greased Lightning, and Which Way Is Up?. Instead I had to live on what I read about him in magazines like Ebony and Jet, and rely on the Richard Pryor jokes I heard secondhand while eavesdropping around family dinners and backyard barbecues on grown-up conversation, which always seemed to eventually veer into what the comedian had done, said, or joked about in his movies and stand-up routine recordings. But Live on the Sunset Strip was one that, by hook or by crook, I was going to see—with or without my mother’s permission. I knew my father would not say no to me.
“Now listen here, he gonna be saying some things,” my father warned. “You ain’t ready for that shit.”
“But Daddy, please!” I begged. “I love him! He’s so funny.”
My father narrowed his eyes and looked at me sideways, like this was going to determine whether I could handle all that came with a Richard Pryor joint. I clasped my hands together in the classic begging position, smiled my smile, blinked my eyes, and bounced around excitedly while he silently pondered the implications of taking a twelve-year-old to hear some Pryor stand-up. “Please, Daddy, please!” I said, bouncing around.
“You’re gonna be uncomfortable,” my dad said. “He’s talking about sex and shit.”
“I don’t care,” I insisted. “I want to see it.”