I’d like to think that this is what makes my own most well-known characters iconic. My secret weapon is the commitment—my dedication to the choices I make as I breathe life into those characters. When my director yells, “Cut!” and we agree to do another take of that scene, and yet another still, I am digging in and layering and sprinkling all kinds of seasoning into the stew that makes up the character, her life, her emotions, her mentality in the moment. All of it.
Consider the scene in the film Baby Boy when Jody and Yvette get into yet another fight, this one after she finds an open box of condoms in her car—the one Jody drives while she’s at work, hustling to make ends meet for herself and their son. In that heated exchange, Yvette, frustrated, hurting, and embarrassed, screams, “I hate you, Jody!” Now, on the page as John Singleton wrote it, it’s simply, “I hate you.” But as an actress, I have to commit to the meaning of the words—their intention—not just the words themselves. It was I who had to decide whether Yvette is really saying she hates Jody deep down in her insides, or if she’s saying she loves him but hates the way he chooses to love her back, or if she’s really saying, “This hurts me more than you could possibly know, but fuck you, Jody. Get your shit and get the hell on,” or if, truly, she’s saying, “God, I love you, let’s go upstairs and make another baby.” The words are just words, but the intentions lead to both the action and the reaction, so whichever way I, as an actress, choose to deliver those intentions will dictate how I say it. In the case of Yvette, I decided that she doesn’t hate Jody, she loves him, but neither she nor Jody knows how to communicate, so she wouldn’t necessarily know how to say, “Listen to me, boy, I have some issues with you and I don’t like the way you take my car and leave me. I hate how you treat me.” She doesn’t hate Jody. She’s trying to provoke him and get something from him—his loyalty and trust. He doesn’t know how to give that, because, like her, he’s a kid stuck in a very adult situation, having to make adult decisions when he’s simply not ready to do so. So what does he do instead? He uses his fist to get her to stop yelling at him, and then he tries to quell her anger and sadness by giving her oral sex. This is how kids communicate. A younger actress may not necessarily know or understand this, so it’s questionable whether she’d be able to move beyond the page—beyond the words “I hate you.” Yvette, then, would have been a caricature—a sassy, thumb-sucking baby mama with no depth. I was able to make Yvette memorable, I think, because I had some mileage on me. I could turn those words around on my tongue and squish them against my lifetime of experience, not only as a single mother but also as a woman who has loved and wanted to love again. And I’d just gone through almost the same situation with my son’s father—a reality that I carried like a festering wound that would not heal. My commitment to Yvette and her choices almost broke the real Taraji.
It is important to me to extend that commitment to the character even when the camera isn’t focused on her. Some actors give their all when the camera is trained in their direction and they’re speaking the words, but they’re content to disappear when the focus is on someone else. They almost become as inanimate an object as the painting hanging on the wall, or the props sitting on the table: still, lifeless. This is not my way. No matter if my character is the focus of the scene or somewhere in the background, with no words to speak in that particular moment, I’m bringing it. For my character’s sake. For my own sake as an actress who wants to make her characters memorable and meaningful. Consider my portrayal of Vernell Watson in Talk to Me, the biopic on Petey Greene (portrayed beautifully and with crackling clarity by Don Cheadle), the controversial Washington, DC, television and radio talk show host. Vernell is a composite of the different women Petey dated during his twenty-year reign over DC radio from the sixties through the eighties, when he died. Because there was no real Vernell Watson that I could call for my research, no auntie or cousin who could tell me her struggles and why she loved that man, I was charged with creating her on my own. I started by considering the time period, studying the civil rights movement, the black power movement, the clothing and hair and attitudes of black folk in urban areas of those times. Watching Blaxploitation movies and episodes of Soul Train helped me get my swag right: my Afro wasn’t so much a hairstyle as it was a crown; my walk not so much one foot in front of the other as it was a strut—a signal that Vernell owned all of who she was, that she felt and was empowered. And then I got down to the heart of who Petey was, because to understand him would be to understand the type of woman who could love him. I talked on several occasions with Dewey Hughes, Petey’s manager (played by the brilliant Chiwetel Ejiofor), who was on set; Dewey was quick to point out that Petey had absolutely no filter—that he would say exactly what was on his mind, with no thought about feelings or repercussions, and being that strong-willed often ran him into walls he couldn’t knock down. I concluded that a man that tortured, that outspoken, that sure, could be loved only by a woman equally tortured, outspoken, and confident; her crazy had to match his damn crazy for them to click.
So when you see Vernell in Talk to Me, she is always on one hundred, even and especially when she is not meant to be the focus of the shot. In one particular scene in a bar, my character is sitting next to Petey but is meant to be nothing more than background. Still, she’s smoking a cigarette and bobbing to the music pumping through the bar’s speakers, and when her song comes on, she lets out a “Whooo, heeeey!” like, “That’s my jam right there.” In that moment, my character is living. She is real. She is filling in the empty spaces and coloring outside the lines to help give a more complete picture.