The director Lee Daniels and actor Mo’Nique have elaborated on comments the latter recently made about being rejected by Hollywood following her Oscar-winning role in Daniels’ film Precious.
Mo’Nique wrote in an essay for the Hollywood Reporter that Daniels told her she’d been “blackballed” because she “didn’t play the game”. Daniels wrote a statement in response explaining that “her demands through Precious were not always in line with the campaign. This soured her relationship with the Hollywood community.”
Now in a new CNN interview, Daniels has opened up further about why he thought Mo’Nique has failed to get plum roles in the wake of her win.
We were out on the campaign and she was making unreasonable demands… and this is where reverse racism, I think, happens. I said, ‘You have to thank the producers of the film, you have to thank the studio,’ and I think she didn’t understand that. And I said, ‘Listen, people aren’t going to respond well if you don’t.’ I love her, and I’ve spoken to her. And she’s brilliant, and I like working with brilliant people. But sometimes artists get in their own way — I know I certainly do often, I have my own demons that I get in front of myself… I think there were demands that were made from her on the Precious campaign, that everyone knows about, that hurt her. And I told her that.
Mo’Nique for her part said: “The phone was ringing, and the scripts were coming... it’s not that I haven’t been in TV or the movies because I’ve been blackballed as Mr Daniels has said, but the offers just didn’t make sense... There were no demands [from me]. There was a request from the movie studio, they called and requested I fly to France for the Cannes film festival. I simply said I respectfully decline.”
She cited her responsibilities to her talk show, comedy tour and family; she says she then enquired after a fee once the studio continued to request that she go, and that the bad press stemmed from this request.
The actor has appeared in very little since Precious, though she is gearing up to release Blackbird, an independent film about a man struggling to come to terms with his sexuality amid a staunch Baptist community. She will also appear in Bessie, an HBO drama about the blues singer Bessie Smith, played by Queen Latifah – Mo’Nique plays fellow blues star Ma Rainey, while the cast also includes Michael Kenneth Williams (known as Omar in The Wire) and Oliver Platt.
