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Even today, when I taste fear on my tongue, it’s my parents’ example I draw on to help me swallow it whole. Nothing could have been truer than when my manager, Vincent Cirrincione, floated the script for Empire my way. I was scared to death of Cookie. After all, I’d been trying to escape the typecasting that had come from starring as the loud-mouthed, around-the-way baby mama Yvette, in John Singleton’s hit 2001 big-screen hood tale, Baby Boy. Yet no matter how hard I tried to climb out of it, I’d been stuck in the muck and mire of screenplays that tried to resurrect that character. The only roles casting directors could see for me were ones that were “edgy” (read: ghetto). Now, after stints on three television shows—one as a police officer in Lifetime’s The Division, one as a fierce litigator on ABC’s Boston Legal, one as a detective in CBS’s hugely popular Person of Interest—an Oscar nod for my role as the adoptive mother of a reverse-aging white child in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and box office gold in the Think Like a Man films, in which I played a businesswoman, I had finally managed to shake myself out of the exclusively stereotypical roles Hollywood producers envisioned for me. I wanted no part of a loud, wisecracking, gaudy ex-con fresh out of prison from a seventeen-year bid on a drug conviction—especially on a television show to which I’d have to commit all of my time. After being locked into fifty-five episodes of Person of Interest, going back to the grueling, stifling schedule of television production wasn’t even a consideration.
“Leave me alone with this one,” I told Vince over the phone during one of the many calls he made, begging me to read the Empire script. I’d been back in Los Angeles only for a short while, and I was preparing for a starring role in the play Above the Fold at the Pasadena Playhouse, biding my time until another film project came along. “Where’s my brilliant film script? I don’t care about this mess. I don’t want to do it.” Vince knew me well—he knew how no-nonsense and in-your-face I could be. He’d learned that the first time I met him, shortly after I moved to Los Angeles and went on a frenzied but exhaustive search for an agent. A friend arranged my meeting with Vince, but he made it clear he wasn’t looking for new clients; at the time, he already had a power roster, including Halle Berry, and taking a chance on a young, inexperienced black actress at a time when roles for actresses who looked like me were few and far between wasn’t a priority. But I got to him by standing in front of that man and being regular ol’ Taraji from southeast DC, with my slightly country drawl and one fingernail painted bright red.
“What’s with the fingernail?” he asked.
I looked down at my hand absentmindedly and shrugged. “I forgot to take the paint off,” I said matter-of-factly.
After that, Vince launched questions at me in rapid-fire succession, and I answered each of them easily and truthfully, hiding nothing. I told him how I’d studied acting at Howard and got pregnant in my junior year—how I came to Los Angeles with my baby and only seven hundred dollars to my name, but a passion for my craft as wide as the Pacific.
“Where’s your son?” he asked when, finally, I took a breath.
“He’s with the babysitter.”
“So you brought him out here with you?” he asked, surprised. “Usually actors leave the kids with family until they get on their feet in this business.”
“No, he’s right here with me,” I said. “He’s where he belongs.”
Vince stared at me for a moment, no doubt trying to figure me out. Finally, he ordered me to stand. “Let me take a look at you.”
I stood, uncomfortable for the first time in his presence. What the hell is this, a slave market? I asked myself as I turned awkwardly. Now I understand that he was simply trying to give me a taste of what it would be like to audition, but I wasn’t feeling it in that moment. Annoyed, I snapped at Vince when he began talking again. “What did you say? You’re talking too fast. My daddy told me not to trust a person who talks too fast.”
Vince smirked. “You’re a spunky one, aren’t you?” he said. After another beat, he said what I wanted to hear. “Okay, you can do two monologues for me.” But, he warned, “you better knock my socks off.”
A week later, there I was, standing in his office, reciting for my life. I came prepared with a serious monologue and a funny one, and hit him hard with my presentation, a scene from Down in the Delta. When I finished, I’d barely taken a breath before Vince burst into a wide grin.
“I want you,” he said. “You were great. You were great, kid. I want you.”
I got up the nerve to ask slyly, “So, did I knock your socks off?”
“Yes, you did,” Vince said. “That was amazing.” Then he let out a hearty laugh as he reached down, unlaced his shoes, and gave me his socks. I still have his olive-green socks somewhere—eighteen years after he agreed to represent me. Ours is a relationship built on trust, mutual admiration, and profound respect, and by now we know each other as well as we know ourselves, meaning Vince knows all the ways to turn my fast no into a slow yes. Which explains why he kept shoving that Empire script in my face.
“I’m telling you, you gotta read this one. You’ll knock this out of the ballpark,” Vince insisted.