Taraji P. Henson on how far she’s come

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 learnt 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 Monae, 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.

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.’”

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.”

At 26, Henson had $700 (Dh2,570.96) 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.”

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.

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.”

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.’”