Taraji P. Henson Says 'Baby Boy' Only Helped Tyrese "Blow Up"

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Taraji P. Henson has had a successful Hollywood career that includes Oscar and Emmy nominations. But one thing has eluded her – a film franchise.

She says that hasn’t been the case for her Baby Boy co-star Tyrese, who has appeared in both the Fast and the Furious franchise and the Transformers franchise, which make up the bulk of the movies he’s appeared in since Baby Boy was released in 2001.

Henson, 55, says that when it came out, she was told her career would get a huge boost. Instead, she says, Tyrese was the one offered larger and better roles, starting with the Fast and the Furious franchise, which he joined in 2003 with 2 Fast 2 Furious. His Roman Pearce character came on as a childhood friend of Brian O’Connor, played by Paul Walker, who died in 2013. Tyrese has appeared in seven of the nine movies released since.

In a 2024 podcast interview that resurfaced when it was posted again recently, Henson told Hoda Kotb that she knew at the time she wouldn’t get the same opportunities Tyrese did.

“It was huge for me back then. I was a female lead, I was new to Hollywood, and I just remember everybody coming to me, going, ‘Oh my God, you’re gonna blow up. Do you understand what John Singleton does to people’s careers? Look at this person and this person.’ But I don’t know, discernment told me something different. And I just knew it wasn’t gonna be that way,”

“I hadn’t even really fully figured out the politics of Hollywood yet. But I just know that something sat on my heart, and was like, ‘I don’t know if that’s gonna be my story, I don’t know that that’s gonna happen like that overnight for me.’ And so, sure enough — but I knew deep down it would for Tyrese.”

However embedded in franchise films Tyrese may be, Henson has had the stronger career in TV and film, earning awards and multiple nominations. Henson won a Golden Globe Award for playing Cookie Lyon on Empire and is a four-time Emmy nominee. In 2008, she earned an Oscar nomination for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Since Baby Boy was released, she’s had a dozen more credits than Tyrese.

This week, she makes her Broadway debut in the latest Joe Turner’s Come and Gone revival on Broadway with Cedric the Entertainer, directed by Debbie Allen.

But she’s never booked a franchise movie.

“After Baby Boy, Tyrese booked two franchise films, huge! Transformers and Fast and Furious. I still have not booked my franchise film. Been in the game almost 30 years. No franchise film.”

But she told Kotb her disappointment has little to do with Tyrese, specifically.

“And it’s no hate or anything,” she said about her former co-star. “I just knew [it wouldn’t happen the same way for me]. But it still didn’t hit me yet, because I was still working. As long as I had a job, I was cool.”

Henson has worked steadily in the last 25 years. She was the lead in the acclaimed 2016 film Hidden Figures about NASA’s Black female “human computers” who did the calculations for space missions in the ’60s.

The truth is, aside from Zoe Saldana in Avatar, Black women have rarely appeared in franchise films, been, outside of, say, Black Panther and other superhero movies. Halle Berry may be the one who’s done so most, playing Jinx in the Bond films, Storm in the DC franchises X-Men and Catwoman, and appearing once in the John Wick film series.

Zoe Kravitz was Catwoman in the latest iteration of the DC franchise, and Tessa Thompson is both in the Creed films and plays Valkyrie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

But it still rankles Henson and maybe makes the case that there should be more opportunities for Black women in films that have franchise potential.

She added, “I’m not gonna cry about it. I mean, it just, I know what it is now. Now I’m on the other side of the table now. You can’t hurt my feelings anymore because now I know there’s politics involved. It still sucks, but I’m not setting myself up to hurt my own feelings.”