Just a few days after we published a report on Mo’Nique regarding how the expected career turning point from her 2010 Academy Award was not achieved and subsequent comments from Director Lee Daniels on her being “blackballed” in Hollywood for making unreasonable demands, click here if you missed it, Mo has decided to hit back at Daniels on the comments he previously made.
In a recent interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, the Oscar winning actress/comedian claimed otherwise. She said she was offered roles in other films, but they just didn’t make sense to her, and continued:
“It wasn’t that I was blackballed like Mr. Daniels said… the phone was ringing and the scripts were coming but the offers that were associated with them made me say ‘I can’t accept that,’” she explained while pointing out that taking such offers would have sent a negative connotations to other African-American women.
“It shocked me… I was yelling at the screen, ‘Don, please ask him what the demands were!’She says there were no demands, but …
“There was a request from the movie studio that I fly to France for the Cannes Film Festival. I simply said, ‘I respectfully decline.’”
She also explained that while she was busy working on her late-night talk show on BET, she had additional responsibilities as “a wife and a mommy.”
“I had a couple of days downtime and I wanted to spend that with my husband and my kids,” she said. However, Mo’Nique said the studio [Lionsgate] continued to pressure her with an offer to upgrade her hotel, but again she declined. When the third call came asking: “What is it going to take to get Mo’Nique to the Cannes Film Festival?” her husband, who served as her manager, asked: “Is there a number associated with it?”
She then commented that Lionsgate responded that it would never pay for anyone to do promotional work for a movie, and Mo’Nique said she only received $50,000 for her role in “Precious.” She also mentioned that perhaps there should have been compensation offered for travel to promote the movie.
“It really wasn’t about the money and I am not complaining because I signed up to do it [“Precious”] with my friend,” she said. “When the movie studio said we can’t pay you to do this, we didn’t have a problem with that.”
But that’s when trouble started brewing and reports came out that she was being “demanding and difficult,” she said.
Mo’Nique is currently concentrating on roles in independent films and her next project is “Blackbird” with Isaiah Washington and will be directed by Patrik Ian Polk.
Check out the interview!
