Some of the impact of Hidden Figures, a movie in which Taraji P Henson stars as Katherine Johnson, a brilliant mathematician and one of the few African American women at Nasa during the early part of the space programme, comes from the assumption of progress. The film opens in the 1950s, with Johnson being harassed by a white cop when her car breaks down on the way to work, and closes with footage of President Obama giving the now 98-year-old the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The implication is clear: just look how far we’ve come.
Today, Henson is in a New York hotel room, shimmering with exhaustion and the thrill, after years of playing second and third fiddle in movies, of assuming a starring role. If you know her, it’s probably from Empire, the hit TV show in which she plays Cookie Lyon, a fiercely ambitious hip-hop impresario and a woman who, Henson says with some understatement, “if you say something wrong to, is going to come back and have her rebuttal”. If you don’t know her, you may still recognise Henson’s face from years of spadework on shows such as CSI, Boston Legal and ER. In 2009, she won an Oscar nomination for her supporting role as Queenie in The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, a movie for which she was paid a fraction of the salary of her more famous co-stars, and for years that is how it went: small parts, bad pay – at least relative to the Hollywood average – and the scramble for too few roles in which an African American woman might be cast. Meanwhile, Henson learned to bite her tongue and pick her battles. “What am I going to do?” she says. “Am I going to complain, or am I going to do something about it?”
If it was aggravating to be considered “too street” by most casting agents, Henson recognises that, with Katherine Johnson, she is playing against type: the actor identifies much more closely with Cookie than with the quiet, undemonstrative mathematician. If anything, she says, playing quiet took more effort, “to keep all of that in. I’m larger than life, so I had to sit on that energy.” Hidden Figures won the Screen Actors Guild award for outstanding performance by a cast last month and is nominated for three Oscars. It’s a deeply affecting movie, not least because, as Henson says, “this incredible story was somehow left out of history”, and if it’s a bit corny in parts (there’s a moment when Kevin Costner, as Johnson’s line manager, rips down a segregated bathroom sign and shouts, “Here at Nasa, we all pee the same colour!”), the performances outshine the script. Henson is supported on screen by Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe, both excellent as her sisters in arms at Nasa, but it is undeniably her film: the 46-year-old is subtle, winning and, above all – given that one has to believe she calculated, in the face of universal scepticism from her white, male peers, the trajectory of a space rocket re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere – utterly convincing.
That last part, Henson says, was less of a stretch than one might imagine. “I had to do a bit of substitution,” she says. “So when I met [Johnson], the way she talked about maths, the way her eyes lit up, that’s how I feel about acting. I understand her passion; you can replace that with anything.” More broadly, Henson understood the scale of her journey; if Johnson and the other African American women at Nasa exceeded the limitations set down for them by society, then Henson, growing up in a low-income neighbourhood of Washington DC and moving to Hollywood as a young single mother, did something of the same. As a child, her father would say to her, “You’ll be a sensation!” to which she would look at him and reply, “What are you talking about?”
Henson is as buoyant about her background as she is about everything else, even though, at a glance, her early years look riven by deprivation. Her parents separated when she was a child and it was only later she discovered that her father, whom she idolised, had been abusive to her mother. She lived in a neighbourhood where twice during her childhood her mother was violently robbed. And the father of her son, a man with whom she was once in love but had been separated from for years, was murdered when their son was nine. Looking back, however, what Henson sees is “a loving mother who nurtured me and painted a world of security”. She sees a father who, in spite of his shortcomings, laid the groundwork for her mature self-esteem. A lot of the best friends she has today are her old friends from DC. And she sees the gift of her son, Marcell, now 22.
Above all, when she looks at her life, Henson sees the payoff from years of hard work and shrewd decision-making. Everyone in her family worked hard. Her father, even during his most rackety years, worked all week as a metal fabricator and did freelance work at the weekend to supplement his income. Her mother started in the stock room at a department store and, over 30 years, worked her way up to a managerial position. Henson loved acting as a child, but after flunking her audition to study drama at state college, was initially discouraged. “They said I can’t act. They didn’t let me in,” she says cheerfully. “And so my friend at the time, Candice, was a heavy science and maths girl, and I thought, ‘Whoa! You know science and maths and all that stuff, girl?’ And she was going to take up electrical engineering and I said, ‘OK, me, too.’”
It would take another few years for Henson to discover the error of this choice and return to her original passion. “Yeah, well, I failed all the maths. I’m not wired like that.” She smiles. “But I can play one hell of a rocket scientist.”
Henson met her son’s father, whom she calls Mark in her memoir, Around The Way Girl, and whose real name was William LaMarr Johnson, in 1987, when she was 17 and they were both still at school. By the time she got pregnant, at 24, she was studying theatre at Howard University and he was struggling to find work. He was her first real love, and also, as she has described it, her only “bad boy” relationship, by which she meant that while she progressed through college, he became increasingly unreliable and sporadically violent. Henson is not a pushover on this subject, but she has a nuanced understanding of when violence can and can’t be forgiven. In the memoir, which was published last year in the US, she recounts how, during an argument, Johnson punched her in the face, after which she packed up the baby and left, moving to LA shortly afterwards and never reconciling with him. Her father, on the other hand, who was by this time a born-again Christian, was someone Henson strove to excuse.
To Henson, it’s a question of self-knowledge. “What my dad taught me – he told me about the abuse. My mother didn’t say a word. She never said, ‘Your father did this.’ She never talked bad about my dad. She left it up to me. And my dad came clean. He said, ‘There was a point in my life when I was just not in a good place.’”
Was she horrified? “No, I wasn’t, because I understood my father. I was with him when he was the most volatile in his life, so I understood why he could go there. He never hid anything from me. Most people, if they have a flaw, they hide it. But when you have a flaw and you expose it and you say, ‘I’ve made a better person of myself’, that’s how you change people’s lives. Yes, it’s a bad thing to put your hands on any human. Anyone should be able to walk away before it’s time to get physical – life is too short – but it’d be different if my dad had said, I never put my hands on her; then that makes him a bad man. Because now you’ve got a problem that you’re not even addressing.”
Of course, the real largesse in this situation comes from Henson’s mother, who did not interfere in her daughter’s admiration for her father. Henson’s parents may have disliked each other intensely, but, “In times of need, when it came to me, they would put their differences aside and come together.” After Henson graduated from college, it was her father who suggested she go to California. Both of her parents believed in her talent, although her mother, instinctively more cautious, was initially horrified when her daughter switched courses to acting. “But my mother knows her child,” Henson says. “She knows I’m a fighter. She knows I’m not going to give up. And what she knew for sure was that I had talent. So although at first, it was like, ‘Oh, you’re going to starve to death’, when she came to see my first play, she got it.”
Her father was a great showman himself and projected every untapped ambition on to his daughter. “My dad said, ‘How do you catch fish on dry land?’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about, Dad?’ May he rest in peace. He said, ‘You have a degree in acting, but you’re in DC and there are no acting jobs here. You have to go where the fish are. Go!’ So I packed my son up and moved.”
At 26, Henson had $700 in savings and knew no one in the acting business. She also had a two-year-old baby to support. Moving across the country in this context sounds utterly terrifying: no money, no job, and an industry not known to encourage the careers of black women. Henson laughs. “I was trained. I prepared myself. It was like Katherine; she was prepared. She didn’t know she was going to go to Nasa to change the world, but she was prepared. And she loved her job and she went to work every day. That’s how I moved to LA. You have to see yourself on the other side.”
There are, Henson believes, two ways to see the years that immediately followed: as frustrating and financially insecure, a series of small jobs with thin-to-no characterisation that she had to wring every last drop of experience from. Or the version she prefers, as an extended period of immense good fortune. “If I sit and talk about, ‘Oh, it’s been so hard’, I would be lying. I’ve been working, right? I can complain that I’m not being paid what I deserve, but I’ve been working. So Hollywood’s been pretty good to me. I own six properties. I have an art collection. I’m able to afford things for my son that my mother couldn’t afford for me. So for me to sit up here and complain and say woe is me? It’s always going to be hard; I understand that life is spiritual warfare, I get that. But I choose the side of hope, love, light, life.” She looks momentarily withering. “Not to say that I didn’t want to pull my hair out or shoot myself in the face because I was so frustrated.”
Filming on The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button was a classic example of this. Henson’s role as Queenie was small but pivotal. This was a major Hollywood movie with a budget of more than $150m, and when Henson’s agents went in to do the deal, they asked for what they felt was an appropriate fee. “It’s not that I went into that job expecting to get paid what Brad [Pitt] and Cate [Blanchett] did. Come on, that’s stupid. They have draw, they have box-office appeal; I’m just getting there. But we were asking for what we thought was fair for me, this actress, at this point in my career. And it wasn’t high six figures; it was right in the middle. And they came in at the lowest. And think of this: I have a team to pay –that’s 30% of that. Guess how much Uncle Sam [the taxman] takes? [Another 40%.] So how much am I left with for the rest of the year if another job doesn’t come? With a kid.”
Henson eventually calculated that her fee was less than 2% of what her co-stars made. Did she have to fight an instinct to tell them to go shove their deal? “Oh, I did. I had to bite my tongue. And the artist that I am, I said, ‘Use it; use it. Think about this woman, Queenie, who lives every day in a cubbyhole down in the dank, dark basement of this house. Right? Use it Taraji, take this energy that you feel and pour it into Queenie.’”
She didn’t get an apology after the Oscar nomination, nor did she expect one. “It’s business. Business. The art of business is to hold on to as much money as you can. And now, when I’m bankable, now you need me. I’m going to get my money. It’s coming. I’m glad that I kept my wits about me, I’m glad that I kept my ego in check, because I know a lot of talented people that could have gone far and beyond in this business, but what stopped them was ego. Expecting things too soon.”
Surely, I suggest, it’s not just a question of ego when there are genuine grounds for resentment? “But if you let your ego take over, you’re not thinking rationally. We need ego, it’s a good thing to have, because it pushes you, but you have to keep it in check, because it will take over. I’m talking about things like, ‘I’m number six on the call sheet, I have to sit at the front of the van, you’re number seven.’ That stuff. You ain’t number one yet, so shut the fuck up and get in the back of the van.”
But when those decisions about pecking order are premised on gender and race, surely it’s not ego to protest? “Oh, it’s absolutely unfairness. Think about the women in Hidden Figures. But if they got caught up in the problems, they wouldn’t have become a solution. Just like me. People always say, ‘Oh how did you feel about diversity?’ Well, first of all I have a problem when people say ‘diversity’, because I know what they’re asking, which is are black people working more? When you talk about diversity, it’s also about women in front of and behind the camera. We should be looking at our DP [director of photography] – she’s a woman, we’re looking at her like she’s a foreign object. She has boobs! Like, come on. We’re talking about people with disabilities. We’re talking about all kinds of people, it’s not just black and white when you talk about diversity, so that bothers me. There’s inequalities everywhere, for everybody, every walk of life. But do you sit and complain about it, or do you continue to work hard so you can bring about a change?”
When the script for Empire first came to her attention, Henson didn’t immediately see its potential. The show, written by Lee Daniels, is now a huge hit entering its fourth season, in large part because of Henson’s portrayal of Cookie, a matriarch spinning out such eminently gif-able lines as, “Get your hands off my fur”, and “You keep forgetting one thing, Luscious. You can’t keep Cookie down.” Henson thought it too camp, plus, as she wrote in the memoir, “hip-hop? Please. Stupid, corny as hell.” She also felt rushed before filming, so that, “The biggest challenge for me was that I didn’t have enough time to shade Cookie.”
As it turned out, not much shading was needed. The quality of Henson’s performance leapt off the screen and the success of the show changed her life – or, rather, as she sees it, the success of the show in conjunction with decades of hard work. “Working for no money, working for box-office appeal, amassing an audience, so that when you do have an opportunity to open up a film, you do it. After I’ve done all this for 20 years, it was Cookie that made people connect the dots. ‘Oh, that’s the same girl who played…’”
Was there a time, at the beginning, when she thought of quitting and getting a regular job? “To me, that would’ve been death. I failed once in my life – maths. I didn’t like that feeling.” She laughs. “Not to say I haven’t failed in life. I’m talking about failing in my dreams. It wasn’t an option for me. And especially when people were telling me you can’t.” These included her agents and managers, who told her from the outset to trim her expectations because Hollywood is just the way it is and isn’t likely to change any time soon. “Who are you to tell me?” she says. “You’re not God. You are just as flawed and fucked up as I am. And just because you said I can’t, I’m going to prove to you I can. I built a career out of that.”
She built a parenting model based on a similar philosophy. “If I give up on my dreams,” Henson says, “what am I teaching him?” The first nine years of her son’s life were hard, with Henson labouring to raise him on a single income, far from the support of her family, and culminated in the trauma of his father’s murder. In 2003, Johnson was stabbed to death during an argument with two people he’d accused of slashing a friend’s tyres. For Henson, the shock was mitigated by the fact she’d had minimal contact with her ex for almost a decade, but for Marcell, who was approaching puberty, it couldn’t have come at a worse time. Being a single parent with a fluctuating income was hard, and Johnson’s murder was hard, but, Henson says, nothing was as hard as preparing her son to be a black man in America.
For most of his teens, she says, her son was depressed, something she attributes less to the death of his father than to his growing awareness of the way he was regarded outside of the house. “I said to him, they don’t know whose son you are, they don’t know you’re educated and you ain’t no thug. That boy don’t know nothing about the hood, but he’s going to find himself in situations that all teenagers and adolescents find themselves in; but if he gets caught, he’s a criminal. He knows it. He sees it. And that’s where the depression sets in. You can’t take that colour off. He can’t change that he’s a black male.”
How did she counsel him? “I just said, ‘Find your power in it, babe, and don’t let ignorance rule you. If someone comes up to you and does some racist act, feel sorry for them. Because they are so ignorant. Don’t pop off, because that’s what they’re expecting you to do and now the cops can come and now you’re in the system. So you just keep your cool, know that that’s life.’” So it went for 12 years and now, at 22, Henson says, “I see that sparkle in his eye again. But it was a dark period, trying to become a young man in a world that’s telling you you’re the most hated species on the planet.”
And so we get to the question of progress. With Trump in the White House, some of the shine comes off the end of Hidden Figures, and the coda featuring Obama seems less inspirational than deeply sad. “What happened,” Henson says, “is that I think we got a little bit lazy. We were like, ‘We’ve got a black president, things are moving, women and the LGBTQ community are getting ahead’, and we got lazy, so this has exposed that we still have work to do. But guess what? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s life. And when the real numbers came in…” She is referring to Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote. “So we’ve come a long way.” What about the people who haven’t come a long way? Henson laughs. “It’s just a little section whose vision is skewed.”
This is her guiding philosophy, the outlook Henson credits with giving her the will to succeed and a counter to the spirit of Trumpism. “I don’t hate on anybody,” she says. “I love to see other people make it. I celebrate other people’s success. I understand that you can’t steal my shine, just like I can’t steal yours. So if you get a job over me, I’m going to say, ‘Girl, that was yours to have. I’m so proud of you.’”
• Hidden Figures is released on 17 February.
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