Queen Latifah Takes on Nudity, Sexuality, and the Indomitable Bessie Smith

When a person gives herself a stage name—and that stage name, of all things, is Queen—you wonder if you’re ever seeing the real person.

But with her performance as legendary blues entertainer Bessie Smith in HBO’s upcoming biopic, Bessie, Queen Latifah reveals herself in ways those of us who knew her from her various entertainment pursuits—talk show host, hip-hop star, Cover Girl, bubbly actress, and LGBT activist—never imagined she was capable.

And she’s been waiting for over 20 years to do it.

Queen Latifah, née Dana Owens, was 22 when she was first asked to play Bessie Smith. Production and development issues meant the project would take decades to finally come to fruition, with HBO producing a script written and directed by Dee Rees, the indie darling with just one other film under her belt: 2011’s gripping coming-of-age story, Pariah.

It’s worth the wait. Not just because of the story it tells, of a singer whose influence extended from Billie Holliday to Janis Joplin and beyond. But because of the scorched-earth, tumultuous power and even more explosive vulnerability Queen Latifah brings to the role all these years later, now at age 45.

“I’m obviously more mature than when I was a 22-year-old and this first came across my plate,” Latifah says. “I’m much more confident. I’m much more experienced. I’ve lived more of a life.”

She gazes out the window of the Manhattan hotel room where we’re talking, the day after Bessie’s New York premiere. After a pause: “I’ve sort of been on Bessie’s road a little more at this time.”

That road, for most actresses, would be terrifying to navigate. Latifah takes the journey at 100, no seatbelt, no safety net.

Bessie Smith hailed from Chattanooga, Tennessee, raised dirt poor and an orphan—her parents died when she was 9. One scene in Bessie finds young Smith chased around the house at knifepoint by her older sister, wailing for her mother.

It was a long journey from that upbringing to being crowned the Empress of Blues. She joined a dance troupe in 1912, before being taken under the wing of singer Ma Rainey and coming into her own as a solo act with hit versions of “Down Hearted Blues” and “Baby Won’t You Please Come On.”

She would become the highest paid entertainer of her day, a status she fought for—how timely—by demanding the same fee as male singers and white counterparts.

She married her bodyguard Jack Gee, a relationship plagued by domestic violence and his jealousy over her bisexuality—not to mention by Smith’s own crippling alcohol addiction. Later in life, she’d become common-law married to an old friend. But her true love, though she could never actually say those words, was a young performer named Lucille, played in the film by Tika Sumpter.

It’s a film that has Latifah, as she recounts, “juggling lovers and getting dragged behind trucks and fighting and running up and down stairs and getting stabbed.” She also sings all of Smith’s songs in the film—in full-voiced, guttural fashion, which you can hear on the already-released Bessie soundtrack.

It’s, to undersell it, a lot.

“I’m not afraid to tell Bessie’s story truthfully,” Latifah says. “The good, the bad, the right, the wrong, the sexuality, the family issues, the violence, the love, the hurt, the pain—I wasn’t afraid to give myself to her story.”

At this point, it develops into a bit of a sermon. “You have to have courage to do that,” she says. “You have to be fearless to play Bessie. You can’t be a chicken. You can’t be a chump. You can’t be worried about what everybody thinks. Because if you are, then you can’t play Bessie.”

Because of the swiftness with which the film went into production, Latifah had just days between wrapping filming on her since-canceled talk show The Queen Latifah Show and heading to Atlanta for the Bessie shoot—a window so short that Latifah almost didn’t commit to it. “I really needed a vacation,” she laughs. “But I had to get this movie done. I had to do it.”

True, the ownership she has over this role transcends the labeling of “passion project.” It goes much deeper than that.

“You know how when people say that life is eternal, that the flesh goes away but the spirit just keeps going?” says Mo’Nique, who plays Ma Rainey in the film. “I believe that the spirit of Bessie Smith kept going in Queen Latifah.”

The script rewrites. The production delays. Repeatedly returning to square one. “It’s the spirit of these people saying it’s just not time,” Mo’Nique says. “I need you to go through life some more.”

There are certainly two elements of Bessie that are going to grab headlines. One is a lengthy nude scene that takes place roughly two-thirds through the film. “People are really into my boobies now,” Latifah says about the attention the scene has already garnered. “I mean, I always thought they were pretty cool,” she laughs.

“It’s in the script. It’s just part of what it is,” she continues. “If I honestly had another script come across my desk throughout the years that required that of me, I would’ve done it if I decided to do that role.”

Still, “that was a big deal,” says writer-director Dee Rees. “We closed the set and made it comfortable. I love that she was ready to go there and wanted to tell the whole story. She didn’t blink.”

Rees is also referring to the surprising way Latifah charged into the other part of Bessie that’s likely to be sensationalized: the character’s bisexuality. Countless words and gossip rag items have been devoted to Latifah’s own sexuality. Gawker has referred to Latifah as being in an “open closet,” and photos of the star out with her widely presumed girlfriend are now fairly common.

Latifah, who has appeared at pride festivals—even telling the crowd she was proud to be “among her people” in 2012—and officiated the mass all-sexuality-inclusive wedding at the 2014 Grammy Awards, doesn’t shy away from any presumptions of her sexuality. But her syntax when talking about the issue is always careful and pointed: she will never talk publicly about her personal life.

So when the conversation turns to how Rees and the film depicts Bessie’s sexuality—beautifully, we might add, in a very straightforward, this-is-who-she-loved manner—Latifah puckers on the cough drop she’s been sucking, fidgeting with lots of “mhmms” and “rights” and “yeps.”

We talk about the different purposes each relationship, male or female, served in Bessie’s life, and the issues she had with admitting and accepting love. We talk about Rees’s own thoughts about why the portrayal of sexuality in Bessie is progressive, in an age when sexual orientation is often scandalized, particularly in Hollywood biopics.

“I wanted to be true to who the woman was,” Rees says. “And I wanted to be matter-of-fact. I think, in fact, in some ways people were freer in terms of their sexuality then than they are now.”

But were there ever any qualms on Latifah’s part to delving into Bessie’s bisexuality, given her adherence to keeping a separation between her personal and public lives? After all, in the wake of playing Bessie, the conversation would undoubtedly turn to her own sexuality, using Bessie’s relationships as an entryway to get her to open up about it.

“This is what it is,” she says. “You can’t go into a movie with qualms. Otherwise don’t do it. You can’t judge the character. And you can’t change them just because. You gotta deal with your issues in order to play certain characters.”

She talks about how when she starred in 1996’s Set It Off, in which she plays a butch lesbian who attempts a bank robbery gone wrong, she had to process the death of her brother, because she was too numb to even cry when required to in the film.

“You have to kind of deal with your ish,” she says. “I can’t go into this movie thinking, ‘OK. I’m riding him in this scene; I’m kissing her in that scene.’ I can’t think about it.”

But what about the other people who will be thinking about that for her?

“People can say whatever they want,” she says. “People will say things either way. Me not playing this role isn’t going to make a difference with that.”

“So I’m going to have fun and do what I think is right for me at the end of the day, and let people form their own opinions about what they think about it, or what they think about me,” she says. “It’s all well and good. That’s their choice. I’m happy I did it. And I’ll do it again.”

We should hope so. Because she’s so damn good.