Taken from The NY Times Article: The Audition That Left Them Speechless
By JAKE MOONEY
Published: December 9, 2007
GABOUREY SIDIBE, from Bedford-Stuyvesant and later Harlem, had seen bright lights and dressing rooms. She had been backstage at the Apollo. Her mother, Alice Tan Ridley, is a singer, and Gabbie, as people now call her, sometimes felt as if she and her brother had grown up behind the bar at the Cotton Club. She had done some singing, too, and had been in a few plays at Lehman College, where a friend was a theater major.
But being the good witch Glinda in “The Wiz” or an Indian in “Peter Pan” was about as far as Ms. Sidibe, 24, expected her acting career to go. She didn’t want the crazy hours, or the worries about money or health insurance that she saw growing up. Her mother makes money singing in the Times Square subway station, but Ms. Sidibe, who lives on West 135th Street, saw herself behind a desk with a steady paycheck. This fall, she was taking college classes and working at a consumer complaint call center.She almost didn’t go to the audition in September for the movie version of “Push,” a novel by the African-American poet Sapphire. She arrived late, as the casting people were getting ready to wrap up, to read for the starring role, that of an illiterate, abused teenager named Precious Jones in a story about incest, H.I.V. and the hope of redemption. And even though the casting search had gone on for months in audition rooms all across the country, she blew everyone away.
Ms. Sidibe cannot explain the wave of emotion she tapped into that day, in a performance that got her a meeting with the director, Lee Daniels, and the starring role in his movie less than a week later.
“I’m sad for her, so I was sad,” she said with a shrug the other day in her dressing room in the Brooklyn Municipal Building, where the movie was being filmed. She is not a Method actor, she said; she doesn’t “become” the character when she isn’t acting.
But there are ways that she can relate. Ms. Sidibe is larger than the typical starlet at the casting agency, and her skin is darker. When she was younger, she was teased about her appearance. More recently, when she hung out with her theater friends, some other girl, taller or skinnier, always got all the attention.
“I was comic relief,” she said. “The best friend.”
Now she is the star. She tells herself that fame isn’t guaranteed by doing one movie. She is, she said, level-headed that way.
But this is a book a lot of people are familiar with. And Mr. Daniels, who produced “Monster’s Ball” and directed Cuba Gooding Jr. and Helen Mirren in the movie “Shadowboxer,” apparently knows talent when he sees it. “She’s way smarter than me, way, way smarter than me, and most of the actors I’ve worked with,” Mr. Daniels said of Ms. Sidibe. “I love her with all my soul.”
When they first met, he said, they talked for hours. And he refused to make her repeat her audition, where she cried real tears. “I have to be really protective of her because she’s baring me her soul,” Mr. Daniels said. “A lot of her truth is in here.”
Getting into character as Precious, Ms. Sidibe slumps her shoulders and lowers her chin to play someone who feels invisible. “I kind of had in my mind that she wasn’t the ugliest person in the room, but she felt like she was,” she said.
Desk-job ambitions or not, Gabourey Sidibe is not Precious; she is a natural performer. But we all have our insecurities. She used to see Mo’Nique, the plus-size actress and comedian, on television and pray to be like her. Now Mo’Nique is her co-star, playing her mother. What she wanted about Mo’Nique’s life was not necessarily the fame.
“I always thought she was really funny, but also she’s very confident in the way she looks,” Ms. Sidibe said. “She’s very happy in the way she looks, and that’s what I prayed about. At that time in my life, I wanted to be everybody else, but I wanted to want to be Gabbie.”She was speaking in the past tense.
“At this point,” she laughed, “I don’t think there’s anyone better than Gabbie.”
You GO Girl!!!! I had the pleasure of meeting this sister twice, we sat next to each other for Tracy Reese's show during fashion week in Feb and then we crossed paths again at the Divabetic conference at Gotham Hall. She's a nice sister. I also read this book when it first came out - it was a good read...a HARD read but definitely a good one (I felt the same way about The Color Purple when I first read it) and I look forward to checking out the performances of both Gabbie & Mo'Nique!
Not sure of the release date for PUSH yet.
"Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads."
