Mo’Nique caused a media blitz last week when she claimed that hit filmmaker Lee Daniels recently told her that she’d been blackballed by Hollywood. Now, fellow actress Sheryl Lee Ralph is weighing in on the matter and showing her support for Mo’Nique.
As previously reported, Mo’Nique opened up about being blackballed in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, saying that part of the problem was that she didn’t campaign for her Oscar win for the Lee Daniels-directed Precious.
“I got a phone call from Lee Daniels maybe six or seven months ago. And he said to me, ‘Mo’Nique, you’ve been blackballed.’ And I said, ‘I’ve been blackballed? Why have I been blackballed?’ And he said, ‘Because you didn’t play the game.’ And I said, ‘Well, what game is that?’ And he gave me no response,” said Mo’Nique.
Ralph addressed the news of Mo’Nique’s blackballing in a recent interview with “Access Hollywood Live” and explained that politics are just a part of Hollywood. However, she explained that the politics are different when it comes to women.
“What’s interesting about that is, she didn’t campaign. I wonder, do you think that they would blackball Tom Hanks for not campaigning for a movie?” Ralph said. “The game is different for women.”
“We don’t know what was going on with that person,” Ralph added. “She might have been in a state of her mind where she said, ‘I cannot go out there and do this with all these people without causing harm to myself.’ We don’t know what was going on in her mind.”
Ralph continued to defend Mo’Nique against rumors that the actress is too difficult to work with.
“A whole lot of actors are difficult. And there’s a whole lot of actors who are mean and terrible, but they work all the time,” Ralph said. “It goes back to who likes you, who wants to be in your kind of crazy company. Who wants to give you money in hopes they’ll get something back on the return on your madness. And sometimes you just need to shut up, sit there and look pretty. … But I think this is a setup for a comeback.”
But that’s not all that Ralph had to say about the matter. Read her suggestion to Mo’Nique about how to stage a major comeback after the cut.
“Now, when she comes back she better be as tiny as you,” Ralph said, gesturing at co-host Kit Hoover. “She don’t need [sic] to be Mo’Nique anymore, because obviously what she was did not work. So she better come back brand new. That’s what they’re waiting for. And if a big-time producer says to you, ‘You have been blackballed,’ what he is really doing is looking at you and saying, ‘You ain’t never working with me again.’ ”
