Tamela Mann plays one of the warmest, most easy-going and funny characters on television, in Cora Brown. She is also an award-winning singer who’s collected a Grammy and multiple Stellars when she isn’t on set. Mann recently released perhaps her most personal album, Overcomer, which details a number of obstacles she has tackled in recent years. She took some time out of her busy schedule to discuss her journey in an exclusive interview with rolling out.
A lot of actors get pigeonholed and they’re kind of identified in public by the characters that they play. How often do people run up on you and call you Cora?
All the time. I would say almost every day. But you know, you get used to it. What’s so funny is the day before yesterday, me and my grandkids … saw these two young Black ladies. They had a little table and they had a little sign on and I just rolled the window down and I was like, “What are you doing?” They were like, “We’re doing some stuff on bullying…” and then all of a sudden [they started] screaming and they scared me and the kids. But they were like, “Where’s Mr. Brown?” And I was like, “His name is David.” … The funny thing is, it just comes with the territory. It really does. And we just, enjoy people. We really like people and it’s all fun. It’s all good.
It’s good to know that you are cool with it.
I’m cool with it. It’s not a bad thing. And I have to tell people when you when they say Cora, Tamela and Cora are one and the same, because our characters and what I had to play was basically myself. So that part came easy, right?
OK, well, let’s get on to the music. Tell us about Overcomer.
Overcomer is coming from a place of basically what it says: Overcoming the last five, six years. I’ve kind of dealt with some different things in my life. I had double knee surgery. Then it went from that to [me realizing] that I needed help as far as the weight that I’ve been dealing with my whole life is and I found out that it’s OK to ask for help.
Weight Watchers helped me with that. We lost like 55 pounds doing that. And then this thing that comes with life called menopause that we face as women. And I noticed that a lot of people don’t talk about it. So I kind of talked about it and wanted to share about it, and [put] it in the music, [basically] things that I’ve worked on overcoming.
