Actress Mo'Nique's career has been pretty quiet since winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2009. These past few weeks, however, the actress has been anything but quiet, airing out her grievances with Hollywood's treatment of her as well as responding to former collaborator Lee Daniels' remarks about her being "too demanding."
Mo'Nique spoke out in February about being blackballed in the industry, but later back peddled to say that wasn't exactly true and offered some nuance. On Tuesday, she spoke to The Wrap to explain the genesis of her frustrations with the industry and why job offers seemed to have dried up:
“When you win an Academy Award, what do you believe that the award is supposed to do? Should it elevate your career financially? So, when we get offers that appear as if I just got off the Greyhound bus and just got to Hollywood and we say, ‘Well, can we get what’s fair?’ that’s gonna appear overly aggressive if [the studios and production companies] not used to people saying, ‘Can you just give us what’s fair.'”
Mo'Nique pushed back even further against accusations that she was an unreasonable negotiator, and made a pretty absurd comparison to actual Civil Rights activists:
“We’re not asking for any more, but we’re not asking for any less. We’re just asking for what’s fair. When you hear my sisters Gwyneth Paltrow and Patricia Arquette who happen to be white women, and they say, ‘Can we have wage equality in Hollywood?’ Well, if there are white women saying that, what do you think we’re getting?”
"So, it makes us smile to the universe when we hear, ‘[My business partner/manager] is overly aggressive,’ because we’re asking for fair. That’s the same thing some people said about Dr. Martin Luther King. He was ‘overly aggressive’ because he was simply asking to be treated fairly. Some people said the same thing about Muhammad Ali because he said, ‘I will not go fight in the war when those people have done nothing to me.’ Now, by no means am I comparing myself to those amazing people."
And as for Lee Daniels, who directed Mo'Nique in her Oscar win for Precious:
"No, I haven’t talked to Lee. If my brother Lee calls me up, I would most definitely accept that call.”
It's very doubtful this is the last we will hear about this situation. Until then, catch Mo'Nique in the indie drama Blackbird.
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