Tiffany Haddish is COSMOPOLITAN’s Travel Issue Cover Star

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Five years since her breakout performance in Girls Trip, Tiffany Haddish is at the top of her game. Between writing multiple books, playing a role in literally every major movie of the summer, filming an Apple TV+ series, and scheming about her next projects, the star finds a little peace—and a hot stranger—while on an early-morning hike with journalist Sylvia Obell for Cosmopolitan’s Issue 5: The Travel Issue. While taking in the sweeping views of Los Angeles, Tiffany opens up about setting boundaries, the privilege of being able to travel, “queendom-building” and more. Plus, in a most hilarious episode of Cosmopolitan’s “Expensive Taste Test”, Tiffany compares hemp gummies, demim jackets, chocolate, jewelry and more.

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On setting boundaries between work and self-care: “I love and hate telling people no. I love it because it’s for me—I have to take care of Tiffany. I hate it because nine times out of ten, whoever’s asking me is somebody I probably really like and care about. If a friend wants me to do a show or something like that, I have to be honest and say, ‘I can’t do it. I gotta get up early in the morning and the reason I gotta get up so early is because I need to go for a walk.’ So you just got to be selfish in a way, and I hate that feeling of being selfish, but I love the results.”

On what’s deck when she has time to get away: “If I’m shooting a TV show and only get two days off, I will rent a hotel somewhere like Marina del Rey or Malibu and take my surfboard with me and go out and pretend like I’m in Hawaii. And then when I have five days, I’ll be like, ‘I got to go, guys. Can’t do anything. I’m blocked.’ I go to Eritrea often because I have land there, family there, and I love going there. I plan on going to Japan this year. Bermuda is, like, my favorite favorite. The people are nice; the food is good and doesn’t taste like it’s got GMOs in it. I’ll probably buy a house there and make it my vacation spot.”

Was there a specific moment when you realized or allowed yourself to accept that this is your life now?
“I’m just getting to that. It is a huge struggle. I should have realized probably three years ago that I was, like, popping because people I know would be like, ‘You need to just put me in a movie. Give me the job. You got the power.’ But I didn’t realize I had power. I didn’t understand it, and they knew before I knew. I just recently went to Harvard and took this class called The Business of Entertainment, Media, and Sports. I realized in that class that I’ve really been selling myself short all these years. You need the writer to tell the story, to put the story down on paper, but you need the performer to bring it to life. And the right performer puts the booties in the seat. You need the booty in the seat. You need eyes on the project, and the element that I was missing was that I had value in that way. It’s not about money. It’s about the power and then being able to create opportunities. Like, on my show that I’m on right now, The Afterparty, I put in a request to see more people like me on the set.”

On turning down a $10 million offer: “I’ve turned down, sh*t, I’ve turned down $10 million just to do a post because it didn’t represent my brand. I turned down $10 million because my soul is worth more than that to me. My spirit, my integrity, how I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror every day…I’d rather be flat broke than get money to do something that makes me feel like sh*t.”

On staying true to herself in an industry that tends to try to polish celebrities as they ascend: “They be trying to polish me. They be trying their best. I ain’t perfect. There is no way on God’s earth that I’m not going to make mistakes, that I’m not going to say something out of pocket, that I’m not going to be out of order. But I’m willing to learn and I’m willing to evolve, and how I feel today might be different than how I feel tomorrow. But if you don’t make mistakes, you’ll never grow. You’ll never be successful. Every successful person I know that’s winning has failed multiple times.”

On Black women being often praised for being “resilient” and “strong”: “This is the part I hate, and I don’t know if my phone has been listening to me or what, but I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about it on social media. I am not just a strong, Black woman. I am a woman. I need to be nurtured. I need to be protected. I need to be soft.”

Cosmopolitan’s Issue 5: The Travel Issue hits newsstands nationwide on August 23.

[Photo Credit: Josefina Santos/Cosmopolitan Magazine]

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