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My dad didn’t let anything slide; he would call anyone on their bullshit—kid, spouse, friend, foe, it didn’t matter. I didn’t always appreciate my father’s voice, but I learned some valuable lessons from him about the importance of speaking my mind, no matter the consequence. If Boris Henson thought you were wrong, he’d tell you about yourself, straight talk, no chaser. That was my father: so real and raw, inappropriate and honest. Isn’t that how it should be? Wouldn’t you want the people you’re dealing with to come from that place? So many people are afraid to live in that space. My father wasn’t, though. From that, I learned to never, ever apologize for who I am—to never apologize for my journey. God gave it to me because He knew I could handle it. So much of what I learned from him, I apply to my profession.
My dad is the very essence of my Empire character, Cookie Lyon, the drug-selling, truth-telling, time-doing matriarch. Some of my best lines are ad libs drawn directly from the crazy things my father used to say. Give it up to Dad for that classic Cookie commentary about modern-day beauty in Empire season one: “You know I was never into wearing all them damn weaves,” Cookie snaps. “Girls walking around with their scalps smelling like goat ass.”
Beyond the direct quotes, Cookie is like my father in that she is the walking, breathing truth who blurts it out without so much as a fast blink, no matter how embarrassing that truth may be for the human on the receiving end of it. There’s a childlike innocence in that. Though the rest of us are trained to stop, think, and manipulate our answers when someone asks a question, Cookie refuses to do such a thing, precisely because of the journey she’s taken. She’s not just some loudmouth ghetto girl who served time and then came up on some cash; she’s so much more complex than that. Cookie’s survived seventeen years in a cage and she managed to get on the other side of that prison cell with her soul intact. The system couldn’t break her. That’s the superwoman power that she has: a voice that matches those gregarious outfits she wears. That is the superman power my father employed when, after losing his home and living out on the streets, he got himself together, found himself a job, and slowly rebuilt his life, finding God, a wife, and second daughter, a new home, and even a studio in which to practice his beloved metalworking. Nothing—no circumstance, no pitfall, no setback—could stop him from acknowledging his struggle and lifting his voice to let everyone know he was always the baddest man in the room, no matter the setback he was processing.
I come by my frankness honestly. I’m an extrovert by nature, and I have no problem being unapologetically bold, loud, foolish, and funny, and saying exactly what’s on my mind. I can think of only one stretch of time in my forty-five years when I shrunk around others: when I was in high school. Chalk that up to a bit of timidity around the fellas (and a smidge of developmentally appropriate adolescent angst). When it came to relationships with the opposite sex, I hid. Literally. Under oversized sweatshirts and long skirts that flowed down to my ankles. I didn’t want anyone—especially guys—to call attention to how bony and flat chested I was. I weighed one hundred pounds sopping wet, and I looked even thinner than that when I was standing next to my best friend, Tracie (who remains my best friend to this day). Hershey’s Special Dark chocolate with an hourglass shape that brought all the boys to the yard, Tracie had the perfect breasts and a round ass. There I was with my little flat chest and a little onion hiding in the folds of all that material I used to wear. The guys were always hot on her; they liked my personality and they thought I was cute, but that was about it. At least that’s what I told myself as I cocooned like a caterpillar beneath those baggy outfits. I’m sure now, with the vision and wisdom of a grown woman, that it wasn’t so much my skinny frame that kept guys away as it was the energy I was giving off. My lack of confidence when it came to attracting guys made me unapproachable, and so they didn’t bother to step to me.
But even as I hid my body, I wasn’t afraid to be me. Whether it was singing a song the loudest, making the most noise in a pom-pom girl competition cheer, or climbing into an ROTC uniform in junior high so that I could show out as part of the drill competition team, I never had a problem looking someone dead in the eye while I gave one thousand. Being “the realest” has its consequences, though. It’s one thing for me to pepper magazine interviews with a few curses or talk candidly about my romantic life and the fears I have raising an African American son in front of a roomful of entertainment journalists or on Facebook. It’s another thing when standing true affects your work or determines the roles you will even be allowed to audition for. My Washington, DC, accent, colloquialisms, and straight talk, both on-screen and off, have cost me a few roles because casting directors simply couldn’t visualize me in the role of the characters I lobbied to portray. I’ve always been different from Nia Long, Sanaa Lathan, and Gabrielle Union, the actresses who’ve been the stars of some of the biggest black film classics, like Boyz n the Hood, Love & Basketball, Love Jones, and The Best Man. I am the sharp, jagged corner to their sleek, smooth lines—always have been, even before I accepted and starred in the role of Yvette, the wisecracking, volatile, thumb-sucking baby mama to the irresponsible hood boy, Jody, in Baby Boy.
Every audition would yield notes from casting directors who would write repeatedly, “She’s too street,” and “She’s too edgy,” even when I would turn myself inside out to pull off my goofiest, out-of-character best. Once, I flopped, literally, during an audition for a romantic comedy flick I wanted desperately to land. The script was hysterical; I read it and said to myself, Oh my God, I would kill this. The scene called for the character to scrape off barnacles from the bottom of a boat, so I ditched my street clothes and showed up to the audition drenched in props: I had flippers on my feet, goggles, a snorkel mask. I jumped feetfirst into that role, figuratively and literally—enough so that the casting directors were able to see my character, rather than me. I got a callback, too, but there was a special request in the notes: leave the props at home. “Too distracting,” they said. When I showed up for the second audition, however, the casting directors, it seemed, were distracted by me. Scribbled in the second round of audition notes were the words with which they would reject me for the role: “She’s too edgy.”
That word again.
That’s who I became in their eyes—that street girl who talks with that DC twang and is a little loud and “edgy.” That’s code for “black girl from the hood.” For the longest time, Hollywood used my real-life persona to lock me in the proverbial box. All I kept getting from the industry, the profession I adore and in which I’ve trained, were scripts for baby mamas and ghetto girls. That was true even of films with majority black casts, which sought to appeal to a broader cross section of moviegoers. Eleven years after my first big role in Baby Boy, Will Packer of Think Like a Man, the hit feature film based on Steve Harvey’s New York Times bestselling book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, initially lobbied hard for me to play Candace, the single mom in love with a mama’s boy. When I refused her, they came back and asked me to play Meagan Good’s character, Mya, a sexy siren who struggles to forgo sleeping with her love interest for ninety days.