When the director, producer, and provocateur Lee Daniels asked Taraji P. Henson if she was interested in playing Cookie Lyon , the outrageous, captivating, and highly theatrical ex-wife of the hip-hop mogul at the center of Empire, his outrageous, captivating, and highly theatrical dynasticmelodrama on Fox, her answer was a flat-out no. Daniels and Henson had met once before: She had auditioned for his award-winning film Precious, about a pound black teenager who is HIV-positive and pregnant by her father for the second time.
She was wearing a short blue romper that showed off her great legs and made her seem much younger than her age I could be this girl! Daniels turned Henson down, but he remembered her. Unlike a lot of directors or producers, Daniels is fueled by profound self-invention, and his characters are extensions of himself. But Daniels is, most of all, one with Cookie: Her extremes are his extremes—from her fierce persistence to her outspoken honesty to her love of peacock fashion and attention.
Like Cookie, Daniels loves to be the center of his often crazy worlds. Produced by Across Media Productions. Hair Assistant: Taichi Saito. In the past, the idea of segueing from a successful movie career to one in television would have been considered risky, if not a total mistake.
But TV today, from the creative talent inventing the programs to the stars acting in them, is a kind of mecca. The parts, especially for women, are more complicated and diverse than in the superhero-saturated cinema. Unlike studio films, which are usually very expensive and geared to a global read: male audience, television can afford to be quirkier.
On TV, there are real housewives, killer zombies, and Silicon Valley nerds. In considering Empire, that kind of fluidity greatly appealed to Daniels. Daniels knew that casting Cookie was crucial to the success of Empire, so he persuaded Henson to audition. But then I started to think, Cookie is going to piss so many people off!
