ELLE’s 2023 ‘Women in Hollywood’ December/January 2023 issue features nine remarkable women being honored for the creative and cultural contributions they have made to the worlds of film, television, music and beyond. The 2023 honorees grace the December/January covers of ELLE, on newsstands December 19, 2023.
THE ADVOCATE: TARAJI P. HENSON
Taraji P. Henson Is Driven by a Passion to Help Others
The courageous artist on how acting led her to “a larger life purpose.”
When I ask Taraji P. Henson what her biggest career goal is, I’m surprised that her answer is retirement. “Well, not retire all the way,” she reassures. “I will always work. I’m talking about the grind—feeling that I have to take an acting job. I really want to start enjoying the fruits of my labor more and be in a position where I can rent a yacht and call my family and be like, ‘Meet me in Spain.’”
On keeping it real: “I like to peruse the aisles in Target and Walmart. Can I afford to have somebody go for me? Absolutely. But then it makes me disassociate from the humans that I have to play in real life. How’s that helping me in my work, if I’m never around humans? I’m not going to subject myself to isolation because of what I do. I’m a Virgo. I’d rather do it myself.”
On filming The Color Purple: “I remember being on a set and looking around like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve never seen Black people look so beautiful.’ [The director Blitz Bazawule] took such great care and he allowed us to bring what we had to it. It wasn’t about trying to reinvent the wheel or trying to do what Oprah and [the original cast] did before us. He really allowed us to just make it our own. And that’s a scary thing to do because we’ve got big shoes to fill. I just think everyone came and showed up and understood how important this piece of literature is to our culture. We brought our hearts and our souls. We just left it on the set every day on this film, everybody. It was such a beautiful moment of my career.”
On how her priorities have shifted: In 2018, after struggling to find a therapist (“I wanted someone who looked like me and I couldn’t find them—it was like looking for a unicorn”), she founded the Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation, named for her late father. The foundation works to destigmatize mental health care within the Black community through initiatives such as access to free therapy, a scholarship fund for Black therapists, and “wellness pods” at places like historically Black colleges and universities. “Acting put me on a platform, and I always thought that I was touching lives through acting, but this foundation is actually saving lives,” Henson says. “I’m grateful that acting led me to a larger life purpose.”
THE NATURAL: JODIE FOSTER
Jodie Foster Has Nothing Left to Prove
The newly laid-back legend cares about the work and not the trappings.
On her advice for younger actresses: “I think it’s almost entirely maternal advice. It’s not really about career, because career choices are personal about how you want to complete yourself and what’s fascinating to you. I find myself reaching out to girls who could be my daughters and saying, ‘Wait a minute, you keep doing dumb things on publicity tours. What’s going on with you? This is a little self-sabotage. You know better than that. Who’s letting you do that? And where’s your mom?’ I do have this really big soft spot for the young actresses who came up as young people, because I just don’t know how they survive without some mother around the way I had a mom around. To be able to say, ‘You’re overexposed,’ or ‘You’re torturing yourself,’ or ‘You have to have faith in your talent. You can go away for two years and have a life and come back and there will be work for you. Yeah, maybe it won’t be in some franchise, but what do you care? This is your life.’”
On the director she would like to work with: “The Daniels. They made my favorite movie perhaps of all time, Everything Everywhere All at Once. That’s the film that I will return to over and over again whenever I feel depressed or sad. I first saw it with one of my sons, and we held hands and pinched each other and cried for 45 minutes afterward. And then I saw it with my other son a week later, and it just opened a portal of connection and understanding and hope. He started telling me everything from his high school that he’d never told me, and we were walking in the rain crying and opening up. And I was like, This is what film can do.”
On the dominance of superhero movies: “It’s a phase. It’s a phase that’s lasted a little too long for me, but it’s a phase, and I’ve seen so many different phases. Hopefully people will be sick of it soon. The good ones—like Iron Man, Black Panther, The Matrix—I marvel at those movies, and I’m swept up in the entertainment of it, but that’s not why I became an actor. And those movies don’t change my life. Hopefully there’ll be room for everything else.”
THE BREAKTHROUGH: GRETA LEE
Greta Lee Has Been Waiting for This
The breakout star of Past Lives talks fair pay, female mentors, and the lack of roles for women of color.
On the fight for fair pay: “I feel strongly about opening up the conversation around the wage gap. It makes a difference how much you get paid, especially if you’re a woman of color, when it’s already so hard because the jobs are so limited. There’s this feeling that if you don’t say yes to certain terms, there are a million people behind you who will take them. I’ve started to ask everyone how much they make, because I really have been interested in this idea of wage transparency. You may be horrified to know what the answers are.”
On the importance of female mentors: “I have so much gratitude and love for Lena Dunham. She was one of the first people who saw me as a person first and wrote for me on Girls, as opposed to writing for an Asian woman or an Asian American woman. I met Amy Schumer in an elevator on the way to an audition for a Noah Baumbach movie, and she later offered me to come on her show, Inside Amy Schumer. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler gave me the freedom to improvise. It felt like a real sisterhood of people looking out for you and helping you, because especially for someone like me, you really need that. I don’t have an inside perspective on the industry and how things work. I’m coming in blind. It really has a big impact.”
On the lack of roles for women of color: “Playing Nora in Past Lives is the honor of a lifetime for me. Before that, I had accepted that either it wasn’t going to come at all, or if it was going to come, it was going to come at the end of my career, if I was lucky. As an actor, there’s always the question, especially for someone like me: Will I ever get more opportunities? You don’t want to address the extreme discrepancy of opportunities for people of color. It would be disingenuous of me not to acknowledge that I have this burning rage on behalf of myself and other actresses like me who do not want to wait for roles like this. I do not want other people—other women, other women of color, other Asian American actresses—to have to sit there and wait. There has to be a better way.”
Photo Credits:
Taraji P. Henson Photographed by Adrienne Raquel
Jodie Foster Phorographed by Zoey Grossman
Greta Lee Photographed by Zoey Grossman
[Photo Credit: Adrienne Raquel and Zoey Grossman for ELLE Magazine]
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