This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare
Gabourey Sidibe
1
Claw-foot Tub and Mermaid Tail
Leave Gabby alone. She’s pretty . . . in her own way.
—like every girl in my seventh-grade class
HALLOWEEN NIGHT A YEAR AGO. I hadn’t been home for months, so when my favorite friend, Kia, said to me, “Boo! GO TO BED! Put your phone in the guest bathroom and take yo ass to sleep!” I knew she was right. Our friendship started on the film Precious. Kia was the production assistant who was mostly in charge of babysitting me. Years later, she has become one of my best friends, my producing partner, and one of the people who knows me better than I know myself. Like right now when she knows that even though I say I’m fine I’m not. Truth is, I was tired. I didn’t want to run around the city drunk. The e-mail I’d just received said . . . shit, two days, and I had to fly out again. I’d have barely enough time to see my mom and my brother, and have brunch with my Main Gay.
The tough thing about staying in on Halloween is seeing all the tweets, instagrams, and texts from people cooler than I am who are all dressed up and out partying. This is more fun for them than it is for me because they don’t get to dress up for a living like I do—this is what I was trying to convince myself, but it wasn’t working. Dressing up is still really fun for me. I heard my phone buzz. I should’ve put it in the bathroom like Kia suggested but . . . I’m not addicted to my phone or anything . . . you are! Shut up! Anyway, among the pictures of slutty outfits showing up on my feed were texts from friends saying, “What do you mean you’re staying in? Come out with us, you whore!” There were also a few pictures and videos of people dressed up as Precious for Halloween. Precious, the character I’d played in my first-ever film. The character who people seemed to think that it was hilarious to confuse with me . . . ME.
Someone sent a picture featuring a black man wearing jeans and a sweater. He had a pillow under his shirt and more pillows down his legs so he looked both pregnant and fat. His face was made up so he appeared to be even darker than he already was—the almost-never-seen blacker blackface. In one hand he held a composition notebook and in the other an empty bucket of fried chicken as his props. He was standing next to a black woman in a gray jogging suit smoking a cigarette and holding a skillet as if it were a bat. Mary, Precious’s mother. Hilarious.
When I was in the fourth grade, I borrowed an evening gown from my mother and went trick or treating dressed as Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind. Never did I think, ever, that one day people would dress up as me for Halloween. What an honor, right?
But I didn’t feel honored. I felt offended. So offended that I planned to ignore for the next few weeks the “friends” who’d sent me those pictures. (I’m very organized in my pettiness, and I like to plan ahead.)
Here’s the thing: what offends me is not that people are dressing up as me. I know they’re just dressing up as a character I played. That character is iconic in her way and probably means more to the people dressing up as her than she means to me. I am really clear about the fact that, while I played Precious, she’s not me. We may have the same face and body, but we stand for two completely different things. Precious is a survivor, and I refuse to be anyone’s survivor because I prefer to think of myself as a winner. So even though the blacker blackfaces and fat-pillow costumes hit me like a skillet in the face, that’s actually beside the point here. I can understand that the average viewer might see them as homage, fantasy, authenticity. My beef isn’t with them; it’s with my friends who are laughing at the costumes and wanting me to laugh with them. My beef is with feeling forced to have a sense of humor about what I look like. Well, I don’t fucking feel like it.
Before I met Lee Daniels, who cast and directed me in the role of Precious, my life was very different. Meeting him set off a domino effect so strong that I can very easily trace the life I’m living—typing in my MacBook in my Upper West Side apartment—back to him. Every yes I get in my life from now on will be because he said yes first. He was the first man ever to say, “You’re beautiful, and here’s what we’re going to do with it.” He’s done more for me than my own father. He’s taught me more with grunts than any teacher has ever taught me with words. All of his compliments feel like heaven, and all of his negative comments feel like a thousand knives to my gut. (I often tell him that what I feel for him is Stockholm syndrome.)
One day while I was sitting around waiting for Precious to come out so that I could finally tell everyone who’d ever been mean to me that they could suck it, Lee called. He told me that his friend André Leon Talley had just seen a screening of the film for the third time, and he loved it. And he loved me! I had no idea who André Leon Talley was, but Lee seemed super excited so I opened my computer to look him up while Lee went on and on.
“Oh, that’s so cool!” I said, pretending to know exactly what was happening.
“You don’t know who that is, do you?” Lee asked.
I wasn’t typing fast enough.
“No, but I’m still really excited! Is he your buddy?”
“No, dummy! Well, yes! He’s Vogue, Miss Honey! HE IS VOGUE! He is EVERYTHING! He wants to put you on the cover!”
By then I had “American editor-at-large for Vogue magazine . . . contributing editor . . . front-row regular at fashion shows in New York, Paris, London and Milan for more than 25 years” up on Wikipedia. Turns out, he’s a legend! My ignorance about him could only be explained by the fact that I am ignorant of most things fashion.
My response: “Aww, shit . . . cool!”
I was still putting together what this meant. It was only just dawning on me that someone could want me on the cover of any magazine, let alone Vogue. Holy hell! Those people who’d been mean to me were really going to suffer now.
“Hello? Gabby? Girl, it’s VOGUE,” Lee yelled into the phone.
Finally, I yelled back, “Oh, my God! Really?? Me!?”
This was the response he was looking for.
“Yes! YOU, Gabbala! YOU! He’s crazy about you. He loves the film. LOVES IT. You’re a star now, Gabby. A star!” Lee’s words were pumping my ego with oxygen.
I’d had too little to do after Precious was filmed and before it was released. Sitting around and knowing that something good was coming was just as unnerving for me as sitting around and feeling that something bad was coming. It drove me nuts. I’d be excited one minute and then depressed the next. I’d wait for calls from Lee to remind me that I wasn’t a loser—that I was a winner and that something good was coming for me soon. This was one of those calls.