Taraji P. Henson Says She Was Typecast as a ‘Ghetto Baby …

Taraji P. Henson was nearly pigeonholed into “ghetto baby mama” roles after her breakout in the 2001 hood classic Baby Boy.

The actress sat down with Keke Palmer on the Tuesday (August 26) episode of podcast Baby, This Is Keke Palmer and reflected on repeatedly being approached to play the same role early in her career. Around the 29-minute mark of the video below, Henson admitted that she was “scared” to play Cookie Lyon “wrong” on the former musical drama Empire, as the character could seem like 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 continued.

Palmer then asked about how Henson’s portrayal of Lyon impacted how viewers saw her, which made the actress recount how she was almost 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 told Palmer. “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 continued.

But it was after her roles in films like Hidden Figures and Proud Mary that Henson “got away” from being perceived as having a limited reach, although she had to “fight” 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.”

During an episode of Lena Waithe‘s Legacy Talk earlier this month, Henson said that her Baby Boy character of Yvette and protagonist Jody (Tyrese Gibson) had a “toxic hood love” similar to the late father of her son.

“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.