It’s not easy being Taraji P. Henson. The Hustle and Flow star, who belted out the chorus of that film’s Oscar-winning anthem, just can’t catch a break on the red carpet.
An accomplished actress, Henson stars as Queenie in David Fincher’s hotly anticipated film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, yet reporters only ask questions about her co-star Brad Pitt.
“I’m not answering those anymore,” Henson exclaims. It’s early December, and Henson is glowing after a whole day of television interviews. The makeup on her face is beginning to come off during her final interview with The Varsity. She’s exasperated by all the Pitt questions, but not all that surprised.
“I knew when I would go down the carpet, [reporters] would go, ‘Yeah yeah, two questions about the movie, and then what about Brad?!’”
While Henson can’t help but note how silly the media circus around Brangelina is, she doesn’t plan on fighting it. “It is what it is,” she concludes.
Besides, it’s not as if she regrets being sucked into the Brangelina hype machine. The reward, for an actress whose previous credits include Smokin’ Aces and Tyler Perry’s The Family that Preys, was the chance to work with not just Pitt but Cate Blanchett, screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump), and, of course, director David Fincher.
“It raises the bar,” Henson comments on the new company she keeps. “You’re working with A-list actors, you better bring your A-game.”
With Benjamin Button, her A-game meant enduring four “nerve-racking” hours in the makeup chair everyday, to help depict Queenie’s aging process in a film that spans an entire lifetime.
It also meant enduring Fincher’s perfectionism. Henson describes how the “nurturing” Fincher micromanaged every detail of the film to the extent that his face showed physical signs of pain when something went wrong. “He’s like a raw, exposed nerve.”
But Henson had no problem bringing perfectionism to the role of Queenie, a motherly figure to Benjamin who could easily have fallen into the stereotype of a Mammy.
“We’ve seen mammies,” Henson acknowledges. “We don’t need to go back in time. We always want to progress.”
To subvert the racial implications of Queenie, Henson called on the gold-toothed hooker she played in Hustle and Flow, whom she gave the heart-of-gold that the part demanded.
“I like to take characters that can be sort of stereotypical and I like to bring humanity to them,” says Henson of her process. “I like to show why the person ended up this way. Have you ever met a young lady that said, ‘When I grow up I wanna be a whore?’ There are always circumstances that force a person to go down that path. I do my research so that character isn’t stereotypical. I don’t judge them. I give them truth, so when the audience experiences these characters, they won’t judge them, they’ll empathize.”
As for her future prospects, Henson hopes for more comedic roles, because, as she insists, she’s a comedic actress. “No one knows it,” she acknowledges. “If you watch all of my work and you watch it closely, it’s funny. … I’m glad that I broke as a serious actor because it’s kind of hard to do the reverse. It’ll be easy to prove that I can do comedy because that’s what I do. When you’re a comedic actress you don’t have to stay young and sexy forever. You just have to be funny.”
And the fondest memory she’ll take with her from working on Benjamin Button? It all goes back to Brad Pitt.
“It is what it is,” she laughs. “How can you work on a film and not be excited to work with Brad Pitt? That’s what it is.”
