She’s one of D.C.’s most successful homegrown stars, from “Empire” to “Hidden Figures.”
This Friday, Taraji P. Henson stars in the new “Netflix” comedy “Coffee & Kareem,” co-starring Ed Helms as her boyfriend Coffee and Terrence Little Gardenhigh as son Kareem.
“It’s a buddy cop movie, but the buddy is not what you’d expect,” Henson told WTOP. “One is a 40-year-old man and the other is a kid in middle school. The kid is very upset that the mother is dating this white cop, so he tries to have the cop taken out. He saved up his little piggy bank and he goes to this little gangbanger trying to pay him to take the cop out.”
As a result, the kid witnesses a crime just as the boyfriend arrives to pick him up.
“They both see this crime go down and become unlikely partners to get away from this gang,” Henson said. “The mother ends up getting kidnapped, and they have to save the mom. Then the mom becomes a part of this kick-ass trio and action and mayhem ensues.”
Henson was ecstatic to work with Helms, who starred in “The Hangover” and “The Office.”
“I literally got the email and the three things I saw was ‘action comedy,’ ‘Ed Helms’ and ‘Netflix,'” Henson said. “I said, ‘Yes,’ and I hadn’t even read the script yet. … I fell in love with Ed in ‘The Office.’ That’s one of my all-time favorite comedy series.”
It’s just the latest in a string of roles for Henson, who grew up in Southeast D.C. and got her start performing at Folger Shakespeare Theatre when she was in junior high school.
“We did a scene from ‘Macbeth’ with three witches around the cauldron,” she said. “We made some noise because not a lot of black faces at Folger Theatre back then. We were this new black group coming through, and they were blown away by our performance.”
She also wrote her own monologue to finish as the first runner-up in the D.C. Miss Talented Teen Pageant before eventually studying drama at Howard University.
“I didn’t get real serious about acting until Howard,” Henson said. “I worked at the Pentagon [to pay tuition]. I didn’t do anything important. I was just a receptionist.”
She soon landed a role across Terrence Howard in “Hustle & Flow” (2005), which was nominated for Best Ensemble at the SAG Awards, then earned an Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actress as Brad Pitt’s mother in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (2008).
Still, her most famous role would be as Cookie Lyon in TV’s “Empire,” earning two Emmy nominations, winning a Golden Globe and becoming the first African-American woman to win a Critics Choice Award for Best Actress (Drama). The series finale airs April 14.
“I’ve had so much fun playing Cookie,” Henson said. “She’s just one of those characters that people can look up to. People are like, ‘She’s my spirit animal! I wish I could walk into this board-room meeting like Cookie does.’ She’s a moral compass and people look up to her to say things they wish they could say. … She’s heroic. She’s a hero without a cape.”
Above all, her most lasting role destined to be played in classrooms forever will be as NASA scientist Katherine Johnson in “Hidden Figures” (2016), which won Best Ensemble at the SAG Awards. Johnson died Feb. 24, but her legacy lives on through the film.
“If it were not for her and her incredible, brilliant mind, we wouldn’t have satellites in space,” Henson said. “She was the mother of that, she birthed it, she gave them the access to get there. Unfortunately, her story was smothered. I and a lot of little girls grew up thinking that math and science were not for us. It was for boys.”
She said that all changed when she read the script for “Hidden Figures.”
“The impact that story had on how many girls are coding now and the inspiration her story gave, the fact that I was a part of that and little girls always know who Katherine Johnson is and I portrayed her, that’s more than I could ask for,” Henson said. “What an honor.”
