Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
The first time Mary J. Blige saw herself onscreen inMudbound,it made her cry.
Im Mary J. Blige.
I mean, like, this is what I do.
Dee stripped me down all the way to what I truly am, and people were complimenting me.
People were saying how beautiful I was.
I didnt know I was that beautiful for real.
You understand what Im saying?
I didnt know that.
Related Stories
If Im onstage every single night, it cant just be for my fans.
It obviously is for me, too, Blige says.
Im going to feel it like it was the first day, Blige says.
Im going to relive No More Drama.
I dont have a choice.
These things really happen, so they just turn up again.
It was a gamble for Rees.
TheMudboundshoot was arduous they filmed, with a tight budget, in the middle of the Louisiana summer.
But Blige wasnt the diva she could have been.
She had this vulnerability and reserve, Rees says.
She could feel much and withhold much.
There were just moments of stillness and her silences this dark commentary she could say under her breath.
A lot of actors tend to be very aware of their surroundings.
She would just go perfectly still, and she was in her head.
Just sitting, thinking.
I hate pain, but I know how to deal with it, Blige elaborates.
To do the assignment God has sent me to do, I have to live certain things.
And unfortunately Im constantly living it.
You understand what Im saying?
Its like trying to talk to a prison class, but youve never been to prison.
Shes done her time with cocaine and alcohol troubles, money troubles, tax troubles.
It wasnt anybodys business, Blige says.
I just kept it and gave it all to Florence.
This is what I look like when Im not on-camera.
Its all about being comfortable.
If your feet hurt, you have to go home early.
My feet started hurting so bad, I felt like somebody was cutting my toes off.
I had to leave, and soon as I left, they brought me a cake.
The other cast members were texting me, saying, They just brought you a cake!
Her lack of instinct for femmed-up sexiness is only one of many ways shes an unusual pop star.
She was never going to be Whitney or Mariah, her contemporaries on the charts.
Hed show her how to wear that baseball cap turned backward.
I wore a miniskirt sometimes, a pleated miniskirt, but I wore boots with it.
I cant sit like that with a miniskirt on.
Her look and demeanor were also about survival, Blige says.
I worked with a lot of men and grew up around a lot of men.
I didnt want them to look at me like that.
Not that the tomboy didnt eventually evolve into something more glamorous.
It took me a long time.
I didnt want to wear lipstick and all this stuff, she says.
And youd be like,Okay, thats not bad,and you start to grow.
you’ve got the option to guess which pose feels more natural.
Or, as she demonstrates, to pull her knees together.
It was the molestation that gutted her the most, though, she says.
The one thing that made her forget about her problems was music.
At 7, she won a talent contest, singing Aretha Franklin.
Her talent solved her old problems but soon created new ones.
I was never as ambitious as he is.
He wanted it so much more.
And so because he would push, I would push.
I was a dreamer and wanted things, but I never was as ambitious as Puff.
Its about this time in our conversation when I realize Im avoiding sustained eye contact with Blige.
Theres something nakedly unprotected about her gaze thats unsettling.
Im always thinking about,What am I going to say if this person just disrespects me?
How am I going to handle it?Because back in the day, I didnt handle it well.
I just cursed you out completely, like right out of the gate.
But now I think about what I say because then the interview was, Mary cursed me out.
Shes a bitch, shes this, da, da, da.
I could get any drug, anything, at any moment.
And then she met Isaacs.
They married in 2003, and he became her manager.
I had never felt truly loved.
Isaacs, for his part, has contended that hes been left traumatized and unemployable.
Then bitter.When the bitter came, I was like,Oh, no.
Im not going to let this destroy me.
A major takeaway from her divorce is that Mary J. Blige Inc.must be attended to, she says.
Im just being straight-up honest.
In many ways,these ought to be the best of times for Blige.
The morning of her birthday, her star was unveiled on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Man, we wanted to be somebody … shake up the world.
But now shes safely ensconced in her high-rise, with her career headed in an unexpectedly exciting direction.
The role of Florence was the real life-changer, she says, opening lots of new options.
Everyone I see, they say, Oh, my God, you were so great.
They didnt know I had whatever theyre seeing in me; they didnt know I could pull it off.
To be quite honest, I didnt even know I did that good.
L.A. isnt quite her thing: This is very slow.
Sometimes youre just sitting around like,Oh, this is boring, she notes.
This is the next chapter, she says, brightening.
Theyre slated to go to court in March.
But she didnt want to go into all of that with me.
Shes talked enough about it.
Maybe quiet is now the way to go for her.
The neighborhood was really tough, she remembers.
Everything we saw, we couldnt say so that was in me.
Because you could end up in trouble if you said too much.
I mean, Dee saw that.
And the scene where Florence breaks a chickens neck for dinner?
Yeah, that was real.
I saw that as a kid.
My grandparents, my aunts and them, they was no joke.
They killed chickens with their hands, knives.
Love is the silver lining of the movie.
The Ku Klux Klan just didnt get the memo, she observes drolly.
But as Rees notes, some forms of racism the film depicts are more subtle and pernicious.
As Rees points out, racism doesnt always take the form of the KKK.
You just have to think that the other people arent fullylikeyou.
None of which is news to Blige, of course.
I ask her what she learned about herself playing Florence.
I learned that Im a really powerful woman.
Besides, despite her reputation for confessionalism, she slyly tells me shes always in control of the information.
