Taraji P. Henson, who has been speaking out about racial pay disparity in Hollywood, reveals that she fired her entire team for not capitalizing on the success of her popular Cookie Lyons character on the hit FIX show Empire.
Taraji starred as Cookie Lyon, the wife of former drug dealer turned hip-hop mogul, Lucious Lyon, played by Terrence Howard, on all six seasons of the Fox drama.
But when Taraji was asked what her best business move had been, in recent interview with the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, the actress slammed her old management team for not following up on the success of the fan-favorite character w
“Firing everybody after Cookie,” she said. “Everybody had to f—kin’ go. Where is my deal? Where’s my commercial? Cookie was at the top of the fashion game. Where is my endorsement? What did you have set up for after this? That’s why you all haven’t seen me in so long. They had nothing set up.”
Taraji continued, saying, “All they wanted was another Cookie show, and I said, ‘I’ll do it, but it has to be right. The people deserve, she’s too beloved for y’all to f—k it up.’ And so, when they didn’t get it right, I was like, ‘Well, that’s it,’ and they had nothing else. ‘You’re all f—kin’ fired.”
Last week, during an interview with Gayle King on SiriusXM to promote her most recent film The Color Purple, Taraji broke down in tears as she talked about getting underpaid for her work and almost quitting the industry altogether.
“I’m just tired of working so hard, being gracious at what I do, getting paid a fraction of the cost,” Henson said after taking a long pause and breaking down. “I’m tired of hearing my sisters say the same thing over and over. You get tired. I hear people go, ‘You work a lot.’ I have to. The math ain’t math-ing. And you start working a lot, you have a team. Big bills come with what we do. We don’t do this alone. It’s a whole team behind us. They have to get paid.”
“And when you start working a lot, you have a team,” she continued. “Big bills come with what we do. We don’t do this alone. The fact that we’re up here, there’s a whole entire team behind us. They have to get paid. So when you hear someone saying, ‘Oh, such and such made $10 million,’ no, that didn’t make it to their account. Know that off the top, Uncle Sam is getting 50%, OK? So, do the math; now we have $5 million.”
