Last December, Taraji P. Henson broke down in tears while speaking about pay inequity during an interview on Gayle King’s SiriusXM radio show. “I’m just tired of working so hard, being gracious at what I do, getting paid a fraction of the cost,” she said, wiping tears from her face. “I’m tired of hearing my sisters say the same thing over and over. You get tired.”
It wasn’t the first time a Black woman had spoken up about this issue. Henson herself broke down the financial pressures on Black actresses two years before the interview with King blew up, and Mo’Nique has talked about being told she was “blackballed” from Hollywood and facing standards and expectations that others don’t.
That holiday season, though, something about Henson’s raw emotion—the exhaustion etched into her face—definitely struck a chord. Her quotes from the interview with King went viral. Gabrielle Union, Keke Palmer, Yvette Nicole Brown, and Robin Thede quote-tweeted the story and cosigned Henson’s statement with their own perspectives as Black women in Hollywood. Family members of mine not in the entertainment industry brought it up at the kitchen table. Henson’s words not only highlighted an oft-overlooked aspect of the Black actress experience, but also connected to the wider issue of the pay gap affecting Black women all over the United States. The world thinks of famous actresses as powerful. If even they are brought to tears over the unfairness of their paychecks, what chance do the rest of us have?
“I think I was triggered,” Henson says now, recalling the grueling press tour she’d been on for The Color Purple at the time. “This big movie is coming out, and I am Taraji P. Henson, and I have this incredible track record and all this work that I’ve done, and people are putting it all together, and people are telling you, ‘You’re so amazing!’ And it’s like, Yeah, but I still am struggling with the same thing I was years ago.”
It was never Henson’s intention to become a spokesperson for this particular issue. And while she doesn’t want to claim any kind of title—“I just want to make sure that the people know that I’m not the queen of pay inequity”—she doesn’t regret the conversation either. “I’ve been saying what we’ve all been saying. I was taught and told that is when you speak up—when your voice shakes the most. Because that’s when you really should say what you have to say, because it’s that important,” the Glamour Woman of the Year says. “I didn’t say anything bad about anybody. I spoke my truth, that’s the only thing I can control.”
“She doesn’t care what you think of her if she’s in the right,” Henson’s friend, R&B legend Mary J. Blige, says of Henson’s decision to speak up. Besides, as Blige puts it: “Somebody had to do it.”
Still, it is a risk to be honest. Gabrielle Union, another of Henson’s close friends, and Think Like a Man castmate, tells me. “You’re meant to keep quiet, otherwise you will disappear from Hollywood. [The industry] will get you up out of here fast.”
“Rarely do you have a chance to say what needs to be said without risking it all,” Union continues. “So when she said it, that was really brave. She’s a head of household, she’s a mom. We don’t have anyone to save us; we all have multiple households we’re financially responsible for. If you start talking a little too honestly then the checks dry up, and you can’t pay for memory care for your parents, or college, or your mortgage. And it happens; we’ve seen it; we know who’s been ousted and why.”
Perhaps that explains what has motivated Henson to wear so many hats throughout her career. In previous interviews she has made clear that a $150,000 movie paycheck—the amount Henson says she made for her Oscar-nominated role in 2008’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button—disappears fast when you factor in the additional expenses that eat up a chunk of the bottom line: publicists, managers, social media teams, agents, and lawyers, plus the real-world realities of taxes and expenses like a mortgage and a child’s tuition. So it was through some combination of curiosity and practicality that Henson became not only an actor, but an entrepreneur, an awards-show host, a Broadway producer, a film and television producer, and an author.
The nonprofit work she does, advocating for mental health within the Black community in particular, isn’t necessarily lucrative, but it has become a calling. “I don’t think we’re here to just benefit ourselves,” she says. “I think humans have been put on this planet to benefit each other, and to be here for each other.”
That she makes it look easy doesn’t mean that it is. “I’m not fearless walking through this world,” Henson says. “I’m scared as shit right now with this election. I have anxiety like you can’t even imagine. But I can manage it when I understand what I’m dealing with.” When she feels overwhelmed, she tends to get “quiet and still.” Then she asks herself a question: Will the thing she’s afraid of kill her? “Most times [the answer is] no,” she says. “Then what are you afraid of? You’ve got to deal with it, you’ve gotta talk to it. You can’t ignore it."
Earlier, when we first meet at Sunset Tower in Los Angeles, she expresses little patience for those who haven’t done the work she has: “I don’t do well in fear-based situations,” she says. “If you’re moving in fear, I move far the fuck away from you, because you’re about to do something stupid.”
“As early as kindergarten I was rambunctious, full of energy,” Henson says, sipping an iced mocha latte in a dark corner of the restaurant. The multihyphenate, who recently turned 54, still vividly recalls when she sang “Tomorrow” from Annie at her kindergarten graduation. “I did something funny first, before I sang, and the audience laughed. I was like, ‘That’s power.’
Born and raised in Washington, DC, Henson had teachers and family members who supported her penchant for performance from the get-go. “My dreams were nurtured as a kid,” she says. “All my loved ones saw that I had this thing, and they all kind of chipped in how they could, even if it was just [cheering me on].”
At age 13, though, Henson thought her acting dreams were over before they even began. She auditioned to go to DC’s Duke Ellington School of the Arts for high school. Her best friend got in, but Henson was rejected. “I thought they was telling me I couldn’t act. So in my mind, that was it for me.”
Henson walked away, even going so far as to enroll at North Carolina A&T State University, where she intended to study electrical engineering. But the path to one of her classes passed directly by the theater, and one day she couldn’t take it anymore. She memorized a monologue and auditioned without telling a single one of her friends. “I was shaking. Fear had gotten the best of me,” she recalls now. “I don’t even know if words were coming out of my mouth. I just remember telling myself, ‘You suck, you’re horrible, you’re bad.’” At the end of the audition she ran out of the room. She could never even bring herself to check if she’d gotten a callback. “I let fear beat me.”
A year into her schooling at N.C. A&T, Henson failed a precalculus course. Henson called her dad, who surprised her by saying the failure was a good thing. “It was a slap in my face,” she says. “But [my father] was literally like, ‘Shake that damn devil off and stop letting that fear get the best of you. Fear and fate can’t coexist, you’ve gotta pick a side.’”
She got back in the game and auditioned for the theater department at Howard University (her second HBCU). This time, she got in. “When I finally refocused myself and said, ‘It’s acting,’ there was no looking back for me.” she says. “I said, ‘I’m going to master this shit. No one is going to say I can’t act ever, ever again.’”
Henson recalls getting everything she auditioned for as a student. She paid for college working double gigs at the Pentagon as a receptionist and singing on dinner cruises. She became pregnant with her son Marcell her junior year, after which she went to the director of the musical theater department and asked him not to bench her. He didn’t; he cast Henson as a woman having an extramarital affair and made her pregnancy part of the production. Henson had Marcell right at the end of a semester, and brought him to class with her the next year until her own childhood babysitter volunteered to help out with childcare.
Henson talks about her years in the Howard theater department with a palpable reverence. “They didn’t care about how light your skin was, how pretty your hair, [if you were] thin, thick, fat,” she says. “[What mattered was,] can you hit your mark and make that person in the back of the house feel the words coming out of your mouth?”
It’s an experience that shaped her perspective as she packed up her life with Marcell to pursue acting in Los Angeles. But the realities of the entertainment industry were a rude awakening.
“Politicking in Hollywood was a hard pill for me to swallow,” Henson says. “It’s supposed to be that the best talent gets the job.” She is still waiting for that to be true.
Henson moved in the mid-’90s, with only $700 and the support of her loved ones to her name. What little money she had came from her family throwing a party and passing a hat around; her and Marcell’s flight to LA was provided by a friend who worked at an airline and offered Henson a free buddy pass. The idea of support pops up again and again in our conversation. The support of those around her is what led her into acting, what facilitated her pursuit of it, and what’s helped keep her there ever since. “Support is everything,” she says. “You don’t have to be rich to support.”
Despite scoring roles, she never felt that kind of championing from the industry itself—or at least, not from its institutional leaders. For a time Henson paid the bills with a job as a substitute teacher in special-needs classrooms, juggling side gigs with late ’90s guest appearances on shows like Sister, Sister; Smart Guy; Felicity; The Parent Hood; and Murder, She Wrote. It was on Sister, Sister that she met fellow emerging actor Union, who remains a confidante nearly 30 years later.
Henson’s breakout came when she landed a key part in John Singleton’s 2001 classic Baby Boy. She played Yvette, the long-suffering girlfriend of Tyrese Gibson’s Jody Summers. It was a nimble, no-holds-barred performance that became a core memory for Black audiences. “When I saw Baby Boy, I thought, Man, if this is not all of us…,” says Blige, who became friends with Henson after being a fan of her performance in the film. “She was so amazing how she portrayed every woman going through something like that.”
When the movie came out, countless people told Henson that her career was about to blow up. “My discernment told me different,” Henson says. “I knew very early on, before I even understood the politics. I saw how things happen, and I was like, ‘Yeah, it will happen for Tyrese.’ I knew that. And once I figured that out, I got frustrated.”
“Men work more,” she once told Singleton. To me now, she says, “Tyrese took the fuck off. He’s in two franchise movies, and I still have yet to do one to this day.”
It’s true: Gibson has appeared in seven installments of Fast & Furious and three Transformers movies. Given the sheer volume and success of Henson’s work—more than 70 screen acting credits across film and television, plus a music video or two, with a mix of comedies (Think Like a Man) and dramas (The Color Purple and Hidden Figures)—it’s a bit galling to realize there’s not a tentpole franchise in sight. It’s very much not by choice. In fact, Henson pauses after laying that fact on me. “Did you hear that?” she asks. “I still have yet to do one. To this day. To this day, babe.
“I haven’t starred in a series since Empire,” she says, her words coming rapid-fire with passion. “Do you understand the anticipation around having Taraji P. Henson on your screen every week? They’re missing it, and that is getting on my nerves.”
She’s not just roiled on her own behalf. Through her production company TPH Entertainment, she’s in the room, pitching projects to an industry going through what’s being called The Great Contraction. After the pandemic and overlapping strikes, Hollywood is in a period of transition, laying off executives in droves and fearful of buying anything that isn't seen as a guaranteed hit. Such attitudes have never been kind to Black creatives, who have to prove their value to studios in ways their white counterparts simply do not—and not once, but over and over. Henson tells me she goes into every meeting thinking: “What are the reasons they’re gonna punk out? What is the reason they’re gonna give me why they’re scared? Every time I open my mouth, the public listens. Are [these execs] not seeing that the people care about what I’m doing?”
Henson was nominated for an Oscar, a Tony for her producing, three Primetime Emmys, a Creative Arts Emmy, and two Daytime Emmys. She won a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Cookie Lyon in Empire. She’s had considerable box office success as well, as both a supporting player (Think Like a Man) and a lead (Hidden Figures). The woman is a household name. It makes sense that she’s tired of fighting so hard to be seen by the powers that be. “They’re making dumb choices out of fear,” she says.
So these days Henson is focused on finding and protecting her peace. She’s paying forward the generosity bestowed on her by aunties and other loved ones in her life, the people who provided childcare and helped fundraise the $700 that got her started in Los Angeles. She’s reveling in the comfort of her home, which sits atop a hill with 360-degree views; the joy of her French bulldog, Buddha; and the support of what she calls the “really good people” around her. “I’m ready to travel, and stay on a yacht, and tap in when something’s good,” she says.
“I see myself traveling more for fun,” she says. “Not for work, not to make money, but just to enjoy the fruits of my hard work. That’s what I’m ready to get to.”
But Henson is far from retired. She’s still got big plans ahead. She’s currently promoting Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist, a crime-drama miniseries following a heist that took place in Atlanta the night of Muhammad Ali’s landmark 1970 comeback fight. The cast is stacked, featuring Henson, Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Hart, Don Cheadle, Terrence Howard, Chloe Bailey, and Lori Harvey. She’s set to produce and star in Time Alone, an adaptation of Alessandro Camon’s play, in which she’ll portray the mother of a murdered police officer. She’ll also star in Tyler Perry’s Straw, and will costar with Tracee Ellis Ross in Stranded, a scripted comedic podcast coming from Audible and Broadway Video.
Still, Henson plans to be very picky going forward. “I’ve played so many characters that now I get sent scripts and I think, ‘I’ve done this already.” When I ask what motivates her these days, Henson expresses that she’s looking for a challenge. She’s running toward a different kind of fear—the good one, the kind that makes for great art. “I need something that makes me uncomfortable or scared, because that means it’s something I’m going to have to overcome,” she says. “So if I get a script and that shit don’t scare me, I shouldn’t do it. It’s someone else’s blessing. If I’m going to transform, that means the audience has to transform.
“That’s what excites me,” she says, her eyes lit up. “Stuff that scares the shit out of me.”
Photographer: Micaiah Carter
Stylist: Wayman + Micah
Hair: Tym Wallace
Makeup: Saisha Beecham
Manicure: Temeka Jackson
Production: Petty Cash Productions
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