Taraji P. Henson says Hollywood almost boxed her in as the “ghetto baby mama” after her breakout role in the 2001 classic Baby Boy.
The actress opened up on the Tuesday (August 26) episode of Baby, This Is Keke Palmer, reflecting on how often she was offered the same type of roles early in her career. Around the 29-minute mark, Henson also shared that she was “scared” of portraying Cookie Lyon the wrong way on Empire, since the character could easily come off as a “stereotypical sassy, loudmouth Black woman.”
“And that’s never my intention. It’s always to make real people [and] breathe life into these characters, so someone out in the world can see themselves reflected in these characters I portray,” she explained.
Keke Palmer asked Henson how playing Cookie Lyon shaped the way people viewed her, which led the actress to reflect on almost being typecast after Baby Boy.
“It’s interesting because when you’re first getting started, when you do something really well, then they kind of just send you a lot of scripts like that,” Henson explained. “So, it happened when I did Baby Boy. They sent me every ‘Ghetto Baby Mama’ [role] and I was like, ‘I’m really classically trained, guys.’”
“They just couldn’t figure me out, I guess. And I think they’re still trying to,” she added.
Henson said she began breaking away from that image after films like Hidden Figures and Proud Mary, though it required her to constantly advocate for herself.
“It was turning down a lot of things and just like knowing like… When you’re trained in theater, you know what a script should look like,” she said. “By page ten, if I’m not feeling something, nine times out of ten, it’s not a good script.”
Earlier this month, during an episode of Lena Waithe’s Legacy Talk, Henson also admitted that Yvette and Jody’s relationship in Baby Boy mirrored her own real-life struggles.
“There were times when I read that script where I got goosebumps and I had to put it down because it was literally the blueprint to my baby’s father and I’s relationship,” she told Waithe, describing it as a “toxic hood love.”
