In the romantic comedy Something New, she was relegated to the sexually promiscuous best friend role, but in a few brief scenes managed to seem like way more fun than the heroine.
#EMPIRE WHOOP THAT TRICK MOVIE#
The success of Empire has brought much attention to the 2005 movie Hustle & Flow, where she co-starred with Terrence Howard and sang the hook on the Oscar-winning song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.” (By the way, I can’t be the only person who picked up the Hustle & Flow reference in last night’s episode of Empire, when Howard’s Lucious injects the lyric “whoop that trick” into “Nothing to Lose.”) Henson gives dignity to a potentially embarrassing speech where her pregnant prostitute character thanks Howard’s pimp for letting her sing on the track, but the real great moment is when she hears her own voice played back with the backing instruments on “It’s Hard Out Here” and is blown away by how good she sounds. Her first substantive role came in John Singleton’s 2001 drama Baby Boy, in which she plays the mother of Tyrese Gibson’s child and displays why she’s attached to the man-child at the center of the film despite all her impatience with him. She earned an Oscar nomination for a fine, understated performance in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but it wasn’t particularly memorable. Her given names come from Swahili, “Taraji” meaning “hope” and “Penda” being a unisex name that means “loved.” Before Empire, she had carved out a solid if unspectacular career. The “P” stands for “Penda,” if you were wondering. She was born 44 years ago in Washington, D.C. While everybody else is recapping the show’s plethora of incidents, discussing its prospects for the future, or pondering what its outsize success means for the larger culture, I thought I’d help you get through your post- Empire hangover by looking back at the career of the show’s breakout star, Taraji P. Like many of you, I just got through the season finale of Empire after enough stuff happened in the first 12 episodes to make Scandal look sedate by comparison.
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