In her new book, “Around the Way Girl,” Taraji admits that she felt playing Cookie Lyon on FOX’s hit drama “Empire” could set her career back.
She was also concerned that the role could be offensive to black people too.
After her agent Vince kept trying to convince her to go after the role, Taraji was forced to make a tough decision.
She writes:
Vince sent me the script anyway, and one night after a fully busy day working on the play, I sat in my living room and picked it up, hoping that reading it would beg off my manager so that he could focus on something else—anything else—instead of Cookie Lyon, the loud-talking matriarch of a record label dynasty. I read the synopsis and sucked my teeth. Hip-hop? Please. Stupid, corny as hell, I said to myself as I flipped through the script. Then I got to the page when Cookie first gets out of prison. I was licking my pointer finger to flip through the pages even faster when I got to the part where Cookie’s husband, Lucious Lyon, tosses his young, effeminate son in the metal trash can, and I really lost it when Cookie, fresh out of prison, visited her youngest son for the first time, only to end the scene using a broom to beat the hell out of him for calling her a b*tch. “What?!” I screamed, alternately excited by the prospects but also wary of its implications: What kind of image is this for black people? “How can anybody justify beaming a murdering, thieving, drug-dealing family into the living rooms of a nation grappling with and floundering over race? What would people think of me playing this violent, drug-dealing felon? Will the NAACP come for my neck over this? Though I saw Cookie’s heart beating all over the pages, I couldn’t see myself playing her.”
What changed Taraji’s mind was realizing she was becoming a victim to fear and as a solid actress, she was certainly capable of making Cookie a multidimensional character a lot of people could learn to love.
“Around the Way Girl” is available for purchase now.
I really can’t imagine anyone else playing Cookie.
She brings so much to the character. She makes her lovable.
Cookie is still ghetto though.
Right LOL