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.
Harnessing that emotion requires a willingness not only to open up, but also to pay attention. I love to study human behavior; I get off on riding my bike through the park and taking note of how a young mother sighs when she leans down into her stroller and catches a glimpse of her baby’s tiny, puckering lips, or the grimace in the face of a jogger pushing through the last step of his run. It’s not a thing, either, for me to linger over dinner at a restaurant just to survey the way a woman’s eyes flicker in the candlelight when her date looks into them for the first time. I even study myself; one time I got so angry my fury manifested itself in my hands. I literally stopped yelling and said to myself, Damn, do you see how your fingers tremble when you’re mad? Harnessing the emotions and taking note of human behavior is what strips away the agendas and exposes the art. It releases both me and the characters I play.
Take, for instance, Shug, the pregnant, thumb-sucking prostitute I portrayed in Hustle & Flow. The first time I read the screenplay, I closed the last page, plopped the script on my nightstand, and shook my head. How in the world would I convince moviegoers to be sympathetic to the plight of a ho? I’m not prostitute material; there’s no way I’d ever let a pimp control my mind. I had to figure out how to hide my power and let Shug shine, but in an unexpected way. Playing her as a dumb, slow ho that nobody cared about would have been much too easy and obvious. And, as I found as I got to know my character, it would have been dishonest, too.
If I wanted Shug to defy caricature and stereotype, she and I would have to become more than acquaintances; we needed to be one. So, as I do with all my characters, I deep-dived into the script, swimming beyond the page, learning not just the words that would be coming out of Shug’s mouth, but every thought, experience, attitude, and inflection that informed them. I’d take her with me in the car and ask her, “Whose baby is that in your belly?” and then when I pulled into the driveway, I’d say, “Do you even like kids?” I’d pace the kitchen with yogurt in one hand and the script in the other, and I’d say out loud, “You ever consider stabbing that muthafucka DJay, the pimp, in his sleep?” Some days, I’d scream out when Shug talked back to me. “I’m not stupid,” she told me one night while I lounged in my living room. “I’m scared and in love!” I screamed so loud my dog, Uncle Willie, jumped and started barking like he’d seen a stranger running through the house. In a sense, he was seeing someone unfamiliar. Shug was there.
When we got closer to principal production, I spent some time in Shug’s world, down in the modest shotgun houses of Memphis, Tennessee, where it was sticky and bleak and hotter than the Fourth of July. Between table reads, run-throughs, and costume fittings, Terrence Howard, who played DJay, a pimp struggling to become a rapper, Anthony Anderson, who portrayed an underappreciated hip hop producer hopeful, and a few of the other cast members and I ran all through the hood, riding through its dustiest back streets and posting up in the cramped, sweltering living rooms of its residents, trying to find a little respite from the sun as we got to know the people for real. It was there that I found Shug’s rhythm, where I felt her weight. It was different from that of single black girls in DC—different from that of poor, desperate women in Chicago and Detroit. This Memphis weight was distinct—country and dusty and slow and thick, like that which I’d never before lifted.
• • •
Tucked into one of those living rooms was a girl who immediately made me think of Shug. Not that she was anything like Shug, necessarily. There was just something about her. She had on pum pum shorts and a tank top highlighting her cleavage and a weave framing her baby face. A tattoo crept up her right thigh; I think it was Snoopy. When she turned her head toward the light, the sun glinted against her gold tooth.
“I’m Kissy,” she said, giggling.
“What you say? Keishi?” I asked, struggling to pick up her accent.
“No. It’s Kissy,” she said, interrupting her answer to make kissing noises, “like kissy.”
We talked and laughed and talked and laughed some more, each of us letting down our guards as the moments turned to minutes and the minutes stretched to hours. They mimicked my DC accent, I mimicked their deep southern drawl; they’d laugh at me and I’d laugh at them. Kissy stood out to me because she had this sweetness about her. Plus, something about Memphis reminded me of the summers I spent with my grandmother in North Carolina when I was a child: I’d gone to the mall and seen a few girls with chests full of baby powder to keep themselves cool, just like my grandmother used to rub on her chest and mine, too, when the thermometer crept so high the only reasonable thing to do was to sweat.
Kissy became the heart of my Shug.
She was nowhere on the screenwriter’s 120-page script; there, Shug was just a skeleton. It was my job as a trained actress to give her skin and fat and blood and DNA—to put the twang in her tongue and the fear deep in her bones and the hope in her heart. But I couldn’t build her until I opened my eyes to see all of her.
My job is to make sure that everyone else sees my characters, too. On the first day of filming, I showed up to the set with a prosthetic on my belly, a bare face, and a bad weave, plus a gold tooth. “She’s gotta have a gold tooth,” I’d insisted earlier, stating my case to the director, Craig Brewer, and to the head of wardrobe. “Terrence has one, so guess what: If Shug’s a bottom bitch, who she looking up to?” Craig stared at me, waiting for the answer. “Him. Her man. Why she ain’t got a gold tooth? She needs one just like DJay’s.”