Taraji P. Henson has had enough of the unfair treatment she’s received in Hollywood, and in spite of her successful career, the actress says she might soon quit the business.
While appearing on Gayle King’s SiriusXM show to discuss her performance in The Color Purple, Henson broke down in tears after King said she’d heard a rumor about her wanting to quit acting.
“I’m just tired of working so hard, being gracious at what I do, getting paid a fraction of the cost,” the Empire star said. “I’m tired of hearing my sisters say the same thing over and over. You get tired.”
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Henson was unforgettable as the brash Cookie Lyon in Empire, which won her the Golden Globe for best actress in a TV drama in 2016, but her career extends far beyond that role. In 2008, she received an Academy Award nomination for her performance in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and she has also been nominated for six Emmys and six Screen Actors Guild awards. In 2017, she notched her first SAG win for her star turn as Katherine Goble Johnson in Hidden Figures.
Nevertheless, Henson told King, “The math ain’t mathing” when it comes to her paychecks. “And when you start working a lot, you know, you have a team. Big bills come with what we do ...There’s a whole entire team behind us. They have to get paid.”
No matter how much work Henson turns in or how much awards consideration she gets, it seems none of that has made a difference when she’s in line for another prospective role.
“I’m only human,” she said, “and it seems every time I do something and I break another glass ceiling, when it’s time to renegotiate, I’m at the bottom again like I never did what I just did, and I’m just tired. I’m tired. I’m tired. It wears on you, you know? Because what does that mean?”
Henson grew so emotional during the show that she found herself covering her eyes with her hands while dabbing at her face with a tissue. “And if I can’t fight for them coming up behind me,” she added, referring to the next generation of Black actors, “then what the fuck am I doing? ... They play in your face, and I’m supposed to smile and grin and bear it.”
This isn’t the first time Henson has spoken out about the unfair treatment she’s received in the industry. Earlier this month, she told The Hollywood Reporter, “I’ve been getting paid, and I’ve been fighting tooth and nail every project to get that same freaking [fee] quote. And it’s a slap in the face when people go, ‘Oh girl, you work all the time. You always working.’ Well, goddammit, I have to. It’s not because I wish I could do two movies a year and that’s that.”
During that THR interview, as with King, Henson cried as she explained the effect of having to deal with this same issue over and over again.
“Listen,” she said, “I’ve been doing this for two decades and sometimes I get tired of fighting because I know what I do is bigger than me. I know that the legacy I leave will affect somebody coming up behind me. My prayer is that I don’t want these Black girls to have the same fights that me and Viola [Davis], Octavia [Spencer], we out here thugging it out. Otherwise, why am I doing this? For my own vanity? There’s no blessing in that. I’ve tried twice to walk away [from the business]. But I can’t, because if I do, how does that help the ones coming up behind me?”
Henson further expanded on these thoughts during a SAG-AFTRA panel on Wednesday with her The Color Purple co-stars Danielle Brooks and Fantasia Barrino.
“When I came to L.A., it was one at a time,” Henson recalled. “And if you didn’t look a certain way—Hollywood had me thinking I was ugly, y’all. They would say, ‘She’s pretty, but she’s not Hollywood-pretty. What the fuck is that?!’”
On stage, Henson urged her co-stars to cherish the meaning of the project they’ve helped create. “When you see a Black woman up here, baby, we jumped hurdles to get here,” she said as her voice broke with emotion. “We fought all the obstacles—getting paid less than. And we do it with grace. We do it with grace because when we speak up too much, we’re considered angry.”
Oftentimes, Henson said, Black filmmakers and artists can’t tell their own stories as they understand them—instead, she said, “we are tampered with.” To work on a project like The Color Purple, she said, is rare—so she hopes that the work they’ve done helps change things for the better.
In the end, Henson’s thoughts about leaving the business seem to come down to self-preservation. As she put it to King this week, “This industry, if you let it, it’ll steal your soul. But I refuse to let that happen.” At the same time, she pointed out during a separate, one-on-one SAG-AFTRA Foundation interview that perseverance is always the name of the game.
“We don’t live in our trauma, Black people—we don’t,” Henson told Variety reporter Angelique Jackson during their solo sit-down. “We go through things, we’ve been through things, history, we know the deal. Still going through it. But baby, let them drop ‘Electric Slide,’ or go to church. Listen, but that’s what we do. We’re vibrant. We’re alive, and we don’t wallow in the muck and we don’t stay stuck in our trauma. We don’t let it consume us, because if it does, we’re dead. We die. So, we are resilient. And be proud. Because everything has been stacked against us to keep us down, and we just keep rising, and that’s what humanity does, if you allow it—if you give it the space to breathe. And sometimes, you have to fight for your space.”
Henson finished her thought with a knowing grin as she said, “We used to that, too.”
