When comedian-turned-actress Mo’Nique was growing up in Baltimore, her friend’s mother made a prophetic comment.
“She said to me, ‘Whenever you grow up, either you’re going to get your ass whipped loads, [or] you’re going to make a variety of money together with your mouth,’” Mo’Nique told me on this week’s “Renaissance Man.”
It was clearly the latter. But when did Mo’Nique know she’d be an entertainer?
“I used to be born Dec. 11, 1967, at 10:38 a.m. That’s the moment,” she said.
Now the Oscar winner is roaring back onto the scene — following a high-profile fallout with Lee Daniels, who directed her in “Precious.” She is starring in my favorite show, “BMF,” and she or he has an upcoming Netflix special, “My Name Is Mo’Nique,” which she co-wrote together with her husband, Sidney Hicks. It comes on the heels of her settling a discrimination lawsuit with the streaming giant.
“You get called offended. You get called bitter. You get called delusional,” she said as a vocal black woman in showbiz. “You get called so many things. You get called aggressive. You get called a bully.”
She added that her special will make clear her industry battles. “You’ll understand why I don’t back down.”
She was very candid about her 13-year feud with Daniels, which reportedly stemmed from her refusal to do press surrounding their 2009 film “Precious” and its awards campaign. In April, the pair patched things up onstage during a Latest York comedy show.
“I remember when Lee Daniels and I were taking a walk after we were doing the film ‘The Deliverance,’” Mo’Nique said of the upcoming horror film that sees them as co-workers again. “He said to me, ‘Why didn’t you only be quiet?’ And I said, ‘Had I been quiet, you and I wouldn’t be taking this walk down the river right away.’”
She added that the A-list director “sipped the Kool-Aid.” She remembered telling him, “You thought you desired to be with the gorgeous people, but you came upon when you get there, like most individuals do, [you] don’t have any real friends.”
“For he and I to reconcile, for him to take accountability and walk out on that stage in Staten Island and say, ‘I would like to apologize for anything I’ve done to you and your loved ones’ — I don’t know if it’s ever been done in history,” she said, adding that he “owned his stuff … So Oprah and Tyler, we waiting.”
Mo’Nique took the steps, not the elevator, and there’s a lesson in that. As for her forming her character, she was influenced by shows like “Good Times” and “The Jeffersons,” which she said “embody different layers of the black family that we just don’t see anymore.”
She considered the nice John Amos, who played James Evans Sr. on “Good Times,” her TV dad and admired Weezy Jefferson, played by Isabel Sanford, for her style. “Weezy all the time had on these beautiful caftans,” Mo’Nique said.
As for Florida Evans, played by Esther Rolle, Mo’Nique loved her approach to being a matriarch.
“I appreciated her because she knew easy methods to be a black man’s wife,” the comedian said. “She knew easy methods to stand her ground, but she knew when to back down. She knew that she could check with her children, but she knew James had the ultimate word.”
When it got here to her own parenting, the actress, who can be a grandmother, has a couple of regrets.
“If I needed to do all of it once again, I might have been way more nurturing,” the star of UPN’s “The Parkers” said. “I wouldn’t have stayed so long on the meeting. I wouldn’t have stayed so long on the party … I wanted fame a lot. And I desired to have the option to provide my son, quote unquote, the whole lot I believed my parents didn’t give me … That meant that I can’t read a bedtime story. Well, I’m attempting to make it higher.”
Over the past 13 years, she has leaned on her family. And now that she’s back within the fold, she has one objective:
“I’m enthusiastic about growing old with my husband and meeting my great-grandbabies.”
Detroit native Jalen Rose is a member of the University of Michigan’s iconoclastic Fab Five, who shook up the school hoops world within the early ’90s. He played 13 seasons within the NBA before transitioning right into a media personality. Rose is an analyst for “NBA Countdown” and “Get Up,” and co-host of “Jalen & Jacoby.” He executive-produced “The Fab Five” for ESPN’s “30 for 30” series, is the creator of the best-selling book “Got To Give the People What They Want,” a fashion tastemaker and co-founded the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy, a public charter school in his hometown.
