Over two weeks since her explosive announcement that she’d been blackballed from the industry, Mo’nique‘s promo trail for her new movie ‘Blackbird’ has seen it blazed and bombarded with questions about the incident.
As if her controversial rebuttal to Lee Daniels‘ allegations of her “diva demands” didn’t light enough of a fire, now the ‘net has been reignited by quotes from a recent interview with our friends at TheWrap. Likening her current issues to the civil rights struggles experienced by Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali, Mo has weighed in on Patricia Arquette‘s memorable 2015 Oscar acceptance speech regarding women’s pay equality and more.
Does she have a point? Tell us below:
“When you win an Academy Award, what do you believe that the award is supposed to do? Should it elevate your career financially? So, when we get offers that appear as if I just got off the Greyhound bus and just got to Hollywood and we say, ‘Well, can we get what’s fair?’ that’s gonna appear overly aggressive if [the studios and production companies] not used to people saying, ‘Can you just give us what’s fair.’”
“We’re not asking for any more, but we’re not asking for any less. We’re just asking for what’s fair. When you hear my sisters Gwyneth Paltrow and Patricia Arquette who happen to be white women, and they say, ‘Can we have wage equality in Hollywood?’ Well, if there are white women saying that, what do you think we’re getting?”
“So, it makes us smile to the universe when we hear, ‘[My business partner/manager] is overly aggressive,’ because we’re asking for fair. That’s the same thing some people said about Dr. Martin Luther King. He was ‘overly aggressive’ because he was simply asking to be treated fairly. Some people said the same thing about Muhammad Ali because he said, ‘I will not go fight in the war when those people have done nothing to me.’ Now, by no means am I comparing myself to those amazing people.”