Tiffany Haddish is rewriting the Hollywood rulebook

After a whirlwind year catapulting to fame and winning an Emmy, she went on holiday to Greece, one of the dwindling number of places she can still go unrecognised.

There, she met a gorgeous man, and although he spoke only Greek to her, it was clear from their frisson and the way he touched her arm how the night could go.

It wasn’t exactly that. I was wondering if the Greek fella had any inkling of what he had missed. This was, after all, the woman who, in her breakthrough role in the 2017 summer smash Girls Trip, introduced a wowser of a boudoir trick — it involves citrus — to the wider world.

She took Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith on a public swamp tour booked with Groupon. She proudly wore her white Alexander McQueen gown over and over because it cost so damn much. She reported back from a schmancy Hollywood party that a woman — she would not say who — had actually bitten Beyonce’s face. Amid the ugly sexual abuse scandals hitting Hollywood, Haddish was like enriched oxygen, providing giddy, much-needed relief.

We were sitting in the courtyard of a recording studio in a nondescript building just off the Santa Monica Freeway, where Haddish was doing voice-overs for “Lego Movie Two.” Since demand for her went through the roof, she has been fighting fatigue with naps and five-hour energy drinks. She still looked great.

Forced to more or less raise herself, Haddish checked out tons of how-to audiobooks from the library: how to be a good person, a good wife, a success, a harnesser of feminine energy and might.

Much of this is in her memoir, The Last Black Unicorn, which took its title from a childhood nickname inspired by a persistent wart that began growing out of her forehead. In the book, she details her tumultuous marriage. (She once called the police to tell them she was about to commit murder. She is now divorced, and her ex is suing her over comments in the book.) She also wrote about the outlandish, vengeful pranks she pulled on a cheating boyfriend.

“I literally wanted to kill myself,” she said. “I felt like everything in my life and everybody that came around was out to hurt me.

She hatched schemes to get her stepfather imprisoned, plotting to date a police officer and then a lawyer, until her grandmother told her she had to let God handle it. (She said her stepfather was never prosecuted. Efforts to locate him were not successful.) “His life was going really great when I was trying to get revenge,” Haddish said. “As soon as I stopped doing that, life started kicking him in the ass.”

At the urging of a therapist, Haddish started doing stand-up comedy. After Haddish got her first big break, performing on the television show Bill Bellamy’s Who’s Got Jokes?. 

“I executed a plan and I’m getting the results, like when you decide to bake a chicken,” she said. “My career is a delicious roasted chicken.”

Haddish’s new goal is create an empire, although she is not sure exactly how to go about it, or if it will be in the entertainment business or what. But she wants to have 40 or 50 people working for her who will be able to buy houses, put their kids through school and pass their money down. “The end goal,” she said, “is to create intergenerational wealth and spread joy, and make sure everyone who works with me can spread the same thing and have it trickle down.”

She is also considering a return to Greece.

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