It was still sticky and warm in New Orleans when we started principal shooting for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in November 2006, and I was miserable. By then, Dad had passed, and my heart was every bit as muddy and broken as that gorgeous city, which was desperately scratching and struggling its way out of the watery grave Hurricane Katrina had mercilessly buried it in just the year before. I was in a serious funk, stewed and served up piping hot with a heap of deeply personal losses and also huge business setbacks—a thorough Hollywood screwing that was, frankly, typical for a black woman trying to make a fair and honest wage in the entertainment industry.
The truth is, I should have been riding high when I got the part as Queenie in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I didn’t expect, really, to get the role in the first place, what with every black actress in the Northern Hemisphere vying for the part. When my manager, Vince, called to tell me the director, David Fincher, wanted to meet, I wasn’t really excited by the prospects of sitting in a cattle call of actresses scrapping for the job. Plus, the meeting fell on the day that I was hosting a garage sale at my place, and I was way more into hustling to sell my gently worn dresses, stilettoes, and other personal goodies to raise a little shopping cash for a trip I was taking to Italy than I was jockeying for the gig. I mean, I’d already set up shop: I had my dresses on mannequins and my jewelry and shoes neatly arranged on well-appointed tables, and even an area with entire ensembles configured for shoppers who may not have immediately seen the value of purchasing more than an item or two. I even had champagne and orange juice chilling in the refrigerator, and donuts, too, because sugar and mimosas make prospective buyers linger longer, which would only increase my bottom line. Vince’s repeated phone calls ordering me down to Fincher’s office were wrecking my garage sale flow.
“But the meeting is going to fall in the middle of my sale,” I insisted when Vince called me for what seemed like the tenth time. I ran my fingers over the flyers I’d printed up advertising the sale: one said SELLING EVERYTHING: FROM THE ROOTER TO THE TOOTER! “Besides, why are these people working on the weekend anyway? Don’t people take off on Saturdays? Can’t they meet with me on Monday?”
“I don’t care how many outfits you have ready to sell,” Vince said emphatically. “I need you to get over to Fincher’s place.”
Reluctantly, I sent out a mass email to my friends telling them that the sale was off and went to sleep mad about it. The next morning, I woke up still mad and, with an attitude, got myself dressed for the part. The anger was distracting, but it didn’t keep me from focusing on the task at hand: even while I was mumbling and cursing out everyone I could think of for my “predicament,” I still knew to keep the makeup off my face, to wear period pieces that would have me looking like the character, and to run my lines so that I could walk into Fincher’s office not as Taraji, but Queenie, ready to kill that audition, even if I didn’t think I had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting it.
Still mad, I hustled myself to the address Vince gave me, fully expecting the pandemonium that comes with the cattle call auditions for which Hollywood is famous. But something, I noticed immediately, was off: I arrived to what clearly was Fincher’s office. Well, this is different, I told myself as I climbed out of my car and surveyed the driveway. There were only two other cars in the lot, hardly enough to produce the pandemonium I was expecting. When I walked through that door, only Fincher and his casting director, Laray Mayfield, were there. It was me he was looking for—me and me alone. Unbeknownst to me, the casting director, Laray, had already whispered my name directly into Fincher’s ear after seeing me in Hustle & Flow, insisting that the actress who rocked out Shug’s character in the film would make the perfect Queenie. Fincher trusted and believed her, and he’d saved the part just for me.
“Forgive me,” Fincher said, “I never saw Hustle & Flow. But Laray told me so much about you, and when she put in the DVD of your work, she cried while she watched it with me. She believes in your work.”
Flabbergasted by the words coming out of Fincher’s mouth, I sat and stared at him, distracted only by Laray’s enthusiastic agreement. “Yes,” she said boisterously in her thick Tennessee accent, “this is our Queenie!”
I was listening intently, but in my head, I was suspicious. I kept looking over my shoulder toward the door, convinced that any second now, there would be a stampede of actresses ready to reaudition for the role. But there weren’t any. Just me. I was being invited to play at a different level that actresses dream of achieving, in a role opposite Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt. This was real.
I gave myself a quick and silent pep talk: Get your shit together. This is real. Forget the sale and focus.
“Taraji, I want you to run a scene for me, just so we can see where you are,” Fincher said.
I chose the scene in which Queenie first finds the baby, old and decrepit, abandoned on the stoop of the nursing home where Queenie works. And in an instant, Taraji, the thirty-six-year-old single mom eager to get back to her garage sale, was gone, replaced by an older southern woman holding on to a lonely life, battered and bruised by the trials that came in the segregated South. When I looked up, Laray was crying and Fincher was looking on in awe. “That was beautiful,” he said. “So tender.”
“Look, you can hire her and make this job easy,” Laray shared later after I booked the gig, “or you can look at all of these,” she told Fincher, pointing to a pile of DVD audition reels.