Her highness continues to reign.
In her latest film Last Holiday, Queen Latifah has found the first role that takes full advantage of her considerable screen presence since her Oscar-nominated supporting turn in Chicago. As Georgia Byrd, a romantic-minded but timid woman who is shaken out of her life of quiet complacency when she receives a fatal diagnosis and embarks on a fantasy journey to live her last days in a luxurious European hotel, the actress delivers his warmest star turn yet in a diverting and even moving confection from director Wayne Wang. Latifah tackles a little bit of everything in the film: poignant emotional moments, to sassy comic banter, slapstick pratfalls to powerful gospel singing–and even a little romance with co-star LL Cool J, and she proves that she can deftly handle it all.
“I think that this is the first role that she has to get into the emotional side of her character more,” says Wang of his leading lady. “In all the other ones, I think that she kind of hides her emotions a little bit. This character has a lot of very raw emotions that have to be displayed, and I think that that stuff is so amazing. She reads to me as funny and as warm as someone that you want to sit next to and talk to, and I think that’s her power on the screen. I think that’s something that you don’t act. It’s just part of who you are. The Chinese say that you look at a face and you know who that person is. She’s just a warm, very funny person with a lot of humanity about her. Hopefully that comes through in every frame.”
Hollywood.com: If someone told that you have four weeks to live what’s left on your list to do?
Queen Latifah: “Week one, pay the bills and The Man. Week two, give the rest away. Save a little stash for week three and four where I would travel to some unknown galaxy where I would freeze myself and be reanimated. No. I really went there for a second.”
Hollywood.com: Have you ever had a life-changing incident that’s caused you to reevaluate your life in the same way that your character does?
Latifah: “I’ve had a lot of life-changing incidents, but I’d say that maybe losing my brother when I was 22, he was 24. We were pretty young. Life was ahead of us and he had been a cop for a little under two years, a younger cop on the force. We rode motorcycles together, and a few days later, boom! There was an accident. So when things kind of hit you suddenly like that and they’re that close in your family, that throws you for a serious loop. It was like understanding that mortality can touch you, It can happen to you. So it really made me feel like I needed to do what I need to do, to live because I might die. It was that simple. I better live because I might die. For a while I was sort of existing because I was mourning, but when I started to come out of it I realized that I can’t just exist. I have to live and then things started to change. I could look out and enjoy the sun shinning again. I would walk into this room and see nothing, but clouds in my mind. I started to see the sunshine again and enjoy it and appreciate it and the smell of the flowers. I was shooting a film in Chicago this April with Marc Forster and I had just had a rough day in my personal relationship. I was like, ‘Forget this.’ I went outside and I just walked down to the lakeshore and I saw some grass and I took off my shoes and took off my socks and I just wanted to feel grass under my feet. And I just walked around and hung out. I went and looked at the water. I mean, I can draw pleasure from those things, from what the earth has to offer, not a fast car or having sex with some fine guy or going to drink my problems away, which I’ve done before. But I’m really bigger than that and I know it. Every time that I’ve done that I’ve known that I could do better than that. So for me walking in that grass gave me the peace that I needed. I think that you can draw from those kinds of things.”
Hollywood.com: Can Queen Latifah walk on the grass in Chicago without anyone coming up and asking for your autograph?
Latifah: “It’s hard. But luckily that day God kind of kept people back far enough so that I could have my moment to find my center, to calm down, to feel a little better and by then I was at Navy Pier. People were like, ‘Hey, Queen Latifah.’ There is a fountain there and I just literally went and put my hands on it and I returned to what I would do as a kid. I remember my parents taking me to the park, me and my brother and us just running around. You’re just playing and you don’t care that you don’t have socks and shoes on, and you’re just running and doing fake karate and all the stuff that you do. As we get older we start working and writing and thinking and dressing and we forget all that stuff we used to do. We spend half of our adult lives trying to remember those things, and then some of us have kids and start remembering because they have that fun while you’re dealing with the parental pressures. But I think that you always have to sort of have that–I mean, it sounds like a cliché–inner child, being touched by that, that innocence where you don’t need that much to make you happy.”
Hollywood.com: We’ve been told that on the set Gerard Depardieu was quite amorous with you.
Latifah: “Yeah. He’s a little touchy-feely, that guy. I like him. He was wonderful, just a natural. He brought such a good connection to our characters, and I think a realness to the characters. And at first when he came on set we had been shooting for a while and so he just brought this energy, this great energy and this thing where I’m trying to track him down between takes. He would go off and was having a glass of wine and a smoke and would be chit chatting with people and they would have to go find him to come and shoot. It was fun though. He just brought a great, great energy to our set.”
Hollywood.com: You look so good in this film and fantastic now. You lost some weight, but you still look like a real woman. How do you personally deal with this professionally and personally?
Latifah: “I never lose weight for you guys. That’s the whole thing: I do what makes me feel good. Right now I’m trying to lose some weight because I don’t feel quite as comfy as I should in my jeans, and that’s really all it is. As long as there are people around that look like me, there are a few more kids that are going to be a little better off. So hopefully we keep creating these actors or singers or whoever who are not quite so thin. I guess that’s part of the reason that I like someone like Kelly Clarkson. She didn’t start off as this gorgeous thing. She’s evolved. You can see what a little money can do, a little hair and makeup can definitely bring us to a smoother look, but she looks like a real person and she’s really talented. She’s been rocking that thing. Fantasia – the same thing. Not tiny girls. Queen Latifah isn’t either. So I have fought through the years not to become that because there are times when people have asked me to lose a little weight. I’ve literally turned down movies. I’m like, ‘Okay, you want me to lose thirty pounds in thirty days to play someone who’s supposed to go with that? No. That doesn’t even look right first of all, and I don’t even buy us together so I can’t even take this role.’ It just doesn’t make sense. Even on Living Single there was pressure from whoever up above sometimes that we should drop a little. I was like, ‘Hell no, because these four girls look like four women that you’d see on the street somewhere.’ I mean, we were supposed to be in Brooklyn and I never knew every woman in Brooklyn to be thin. I always remember what I had to look up to and why I might’ve felt uncomfortable about my body. It was because I didn’t look like most of the people in the magazines and I didn’t look like most of the people on the TV, and so I didn’t have anyone to identify with, and thaat made me feel like I had to look like these people. Well, guess what? I don’t. So how the hell am I going to do that? So I’m always going to try and just be me so that some other kid out there feels like, ‘Hey, you can still make it and be that way.’”
Hollywood.com: You’re trying to have healthy habits. How many times a week are you working out?
Latifah: “I’m just starting out on a plan again and so I’ll probably go as many times as six days a week, but I won’t be in the gym six days a week. I get too bored. I usually do cardio outside and walk that trail. I can’t be indoors with this going on. I’m not saying that I have ADD, but I do get easily distracted and easily bored. So my trainer has to keep me doing a bunch of different things. We hit the weights a little bit, box a little bit, stretch, cardio. I take classes and hop on the spinning classes, or go to hike one of these mountains up here or do one of the trails. I just have to mix it up.”
Hollywood.com: You just got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. How was that whole experience?
Latifah: “Man, that was the bomb. I might go over there later and just kind of look at it.”
Hollywood.com: When you were a kid was this an impossible dream for you?
Latifah: “It was never an impossible dream for me. It was always something that I always thought could be possible, because the people I knew I found to be extremely talented and intelligent and most people I knew didn’t look who was on TV anyway. So it never meant that I couldn’t accomplish things. It just meant that if I wanted to do that, then that would be a lot harder. It might be a lot harder, but it really wasn’t and if anything when I realized that I was unique and it was setting me apart that the more I stuck to who I was the more unique I would be the more special and interesting people seem to find me. I just stayed on that path because I started to believe it. There really is only one Dana Owens on this planet. I need to keep growing this person.”
Last Holiday opens in theaters Jan. 13.
