From EbonyJet.com
People may have taken notice of Washington D.C. native Taraji P. Henson in her role in 2005’s Hustle and Flow, but she’s an acting veteran in dozens of television and film roles since the late 90’s including CSI, House, Boston Legal, Something New and The Family That Preys.
She’s about to make a bigger impact with her major role in the highly anticipated fantasy film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in which she plays the adoptive mother of Button, played by Brad Pitt, who is born old and gets younger as everyone around him grows older. In January she follows up with her lead role alongside Morris Chestnut in Not Easily Broken, based on the T.D. Jakes novel about a couple trying to save a troubled marriage. Recently Henson sat down to talk to EbonyJet.com about her new films, her approach to acting and a thing or two about those celebrity gossip blogs.
EBONY: The buzz among Hollywood insiders for the past few months is that you’re a sure bet for an Oscar nomination for your performance in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Can you sleep at night?
HENSON: I feel honored but, you know, I just want to leave that alone. I’ll just leave that up to the stars (laughs).
The director of Button, David Fincher (Zodiac, Fight Club, Se7en, Panic Room) has a well known reputation for being a difficult, extremely demanding director. He’s known to do 50 or 60 takes of a scene until he gets what he wants. What was the experience like working for him?
Well I don’t see it as being difficult. I actually found it quite refreshing that I met someone on this planet who is more obsessive than I am. I look at it that he’s a perfectionist. So am I. I mean that’s your art, that represents you. Your name is all over it and you want it to be the best. It’s very rare in the film industry where you get a chance to take your time with a film. And I think it’s because of what he produces — the final product — that the studios are like, “Hey, this guy knows what he’s doing so, let’s give him all the time he needs.” I didn’t even count the takes. It was just great being in a position where we didn’t have to rush, rush, rush.
Because of the nature of the movie there are very few scenes in Button that don’t have a special effect of some kind. How do you play off a scene reacting to a person who isn’t there and make it look convincing?
Well what they did, which was very smart, was they hired actors of various sizes to portray Benjamin Button at different ages and the actors wore a blue sock over their heads with the faces cut out and the blue sock represented the green screen on which they would then digitally transpose Brad Pitt’s face. So it wasn’t like I had someone standing off camera I was reading lines to. There were actors giving me things I could respond to. So once Brad did his work and they CGI’d his face over it, it worked!
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