Friends: A Love Story (17 page)

On the personal side it was nice to be back in New York while we were filming. I got to see my family, go to the theater at night, reconnect with old friends, walk places and take the subway. My aunt Lorraine (my mother's sister) introduced me to a guy named Joe, who served on some board with her up in Harlem. We started dating. Joe was really nice, bright, well educated and came from a good family. I thought he was a great catch. He was a lawyer and had an easygoing personality, though practicing law didn't really seem to be his thing; he was more entrepreneurial—opening a restaurant, a travel agency, an ice-cream parlor. He also had strong ideas about what he thought was important. He liked to fast once a week and one weekend a month, and wanted me to do it with him. In the beginning of our relationship, I would think, “Okay, but damn, I'm hungry.” By the time the weekend was over, I would be eating cookies, drinking soda, orange juice—anything I could get my hands on. Later on, I would tell him, “But I don't
want
to fast.” He tried to twist my arm, but I wasn't into it. Still, he was a good guy, and after the filming of
Malcolm
ended and I returned to L.A., we continued to date long distance. That meant I would return to New York periodically. On one trip it seemed like everyone on the subway was reading Terry McMillan's novel
Waiting to Exhale
at the same time.

 

Shortly after I returned to Los Angeles, I got a call for an audition for a movie based on
I, Tina,
the memoir of Tina Turner, which had been published about a year earlier. I had not read the book but I certainly knew Tina Turner. Everyone knew Ike and Tina, just like we knew Nancy Wilson, Diana Washington, Lou Rawls and the people who sang all the other classic music your parents played on the stereo. I could sho'
'nuff sing some “I'd rather sleep in a hollow log….” My audition was with casting director Ruben Cannon. Ruben had his own business, Ruben Cannon & Associates. In a sense he had had to audition for his job just like I had to audition for
I, Tina.
Ruben's role was to keep up with the talent pool, to know who was dependable, who was most right for a given role, to find the talent that would make the director happy. He didn't have the power to say, “Yes, you have the job,” but he could say, “No, you can't meet the director.”

I went to Ruben's office and presented myself as a fresh, clean face—a blank canvas—not a lot of makeup. I wanted him to see me as Tina; I have eyes shaped like hers, I have full lips like her, I have brown skin like her, I have hair…Well, you can make hair look like anything; I chose to pull mine back into a ponytail. I wore a simple shift—a spaghetti-strapped, knee-length, A-line dress with an abstract yellow, tan and beige design. You could see my arms, my legs, my calves. You could see that I was fit—not big, not small.

When I walked into the room, there was Ruben, the desk and me. And there were résumés everywhere, just boxes and boxes of pictures on the floor. I had the definite feeling that everyone—even if they didn't have an agent—wanted to be part of this film. After I entered the room, Ruben opened the blinds and window. Then he picked up a CD of Tina—one with her wearing an Afro. He held the CD out in front of him, sort of looked at it, then he looked me. He looked at it. He looked at me. Then he said, “You can audition. I'm going to let you audition for the director.” That was it. I guess my strategy worked. I resembled her in a way and he could see from my résumé that I was working. I had done quite a bit of television movies and episodic dramas. I had also done
Boyz N the Hood
and that had done well. I had just played Katherine Jackson. That had done very well. And I had a Yale drama degree. I was hopeful that it would help me in this weeding-out process, and it did.

For the audition with the director, I was not able to read the whole script beforehand. At some point I did, though, and I knew it needed a lot of work. It opened on the banks of the Nile River with a cloudy-eyed old lady doing a fortune-teller, guru, all-knowing kind of thing, reading baby Tina's fortune. When I read it, I thought, “What the heck is this?” I'm certain I was given several sides, individual scenes a couple of pages long. When you get sides you try to imagine the context: Who am I? Where am I? What's going on in my world? Sometimes it's clear from what's written; other times it's not, but you have to make perfect sense of whatever you're given. If you're lucky you hit it on the nose, but you could also be way off the mark.

This situation seemed pretty clear: Ike and Tina had a relationship. In one scene she tells him that maybe they should do another kind of music. Her comment gets his ire up. She starts backpedaling and apologizing, then a fight breaks out. The scenes weren't long but they were intensely emotional. You know how a car might go from zero to sixty in ten seconds? Well, these scenes went from zero to sixty in what felt like three seconds. You had to turn on a dime, from peaceful and serene, everything's okay to—
Pow!
—getting the crap beat out of you. From calm to where you're fighting, scared for your life. Fortunately, I knew how to do that from my role as Martha Pentacost. I called on that experience as I prepared.

I came to the audition with my same blank-canvas look. I couldn't look like her any more than I did. Maybe I could have done my hair like hers, but that would be trying too hard. Even then, I needed to lose a few pounds, I wasn't a dancer, I couldn't sing. (Fortunately, there was no singing in the sides and she was going to redub the songs, do fresh recordings.) What was called for was acting. I sat alone in the anteroom. That was good. Most times when you arrive at an audition, you usually have to wait in a waiting room with other actors. “Hi, how are you? What have you been doing lately?” Ugh! Or maybe one of the actors
is talking to the receptionist. “How's so and so been?”—the insider thing—and your insecurities kick in. She knows them. You're thinking, They like her; she's a shoo-in. Or maybe someone starts talking to you and engaging you—perhaps they haven't seen you in a long time or they're gregarious or giving you nervous, mindless conversation. Maybe how you relax is by going over your lines or sitting quietly—but you can't because someone is giving you conversation, conversation, conversation. You can't step outside to get away from them because you don't want to miss your turn.

The walls in this office were paper thin. Sometimes when this happens you get a little preview, you hear what happens. “That doesn't sound believable,” or “Hmm…she really put her foot in it.” You can get a little intimidated or feel more confident. I didn't know who the person auditioning was—I was certain she would be better than me. Yet I was hoping I could put my own twist on the lines. Like we were all wearing the same blue pinstriped suit, but maybe I'd made the lining of mine shocking red or canary yellow. It's still a little pinstriped blue suit but—it's got a little flare. But as the woman started acting and I listened to how she performed the role, I felt like there was room for me to shine.

When I was called into the audition room, I again met Ruben, who was very nice, along with Doug Chapin, one of the producers who had bought the rights to the book and shepherded it along to this point. I read with Ruben. Ruben is a great casting director but he's not an actor; he didn't have an actor's instincts. Regardless, I had to read as if he did. I had to imagine that he was an actor, I had to imagine that he was Ike. We did about three or four scenes. The last one was very hard and required emotional volatility. There was no lead-up time; it was just turn on a dime. The scene changed in a nanosecond—lightning split, quick, emotional changes, transitions! If Ruben had been an actor, he might have done some things with
his voice or perhaps with gestures to threaten me. He was just the reader, but in my mind, in my imagination, I invested Ruben with every bit of violence and intimidation that I could muster. Tina had been afraid and in love and fighting for her life and making up and backpedaling. I reacted to Ruben's—Ike's—words as if he was about to
kill
me! I fell on the floor. Tears shot out of my eyes. In that moment I was there—not outside, not looking in, not removed from it. Ike was real.

“Whatchu say? Whatchu gonna do?”

The scene may have been one page long or one page and a quarter.
Boom!
It was quick.
Quick!
But when we finished I had to get up and wipe the tears off my face. I knew I had “put my foot in it!” as they say—I had performed incredibly well. I thought, “Oh, girl, I surprised myself. Oh, my gosh, I showed up for that one! Aww, that take was sweet. Give me another helping, please!” It doesn't get any better than that. They should have been filming. I wish I were in costume. Any lights, camera,
action!

Later I would learn that that was the moment when everyone in the room said, “We found her!” At the time, all I knew was that I was satisfied but that other people still had to audition and were scheduled to come in. The gossip on the grapevine was asking, “Is Tina going to do it?” The director was married to Lynn Whitfield. In my mind, that made her a shoo-in for the role; I didn't know they had broken up. I remember thinking that Robin Givens still hadn't auditioned. She was doing lots of movies back then; she was the black “it” girl. Women my age still had to audition and the young Tinas still had to audition. All were wonderful actors. The production team may have felt I was the one, but they still had to be sure, they had to be fair. Like everyone else I waited until the auditions were finished.

But when I got the call that they liked me, it wasn't because I had been awarded the part. I was told that the people I had auditioned in front of didn't have the final authority to hire me.
Disney execs would have the final say. I would have to participate in a screen test. Unlike an audition where there's no scenery or props, for a screen test they try to give the actors and the audience evaluating the actors a fair approximation of what's going on so there's much less left to the imagination. They construct a set and light it properly. The actors wear costumes, act and are actually filmed.

When I was asked to screen-test, I had a good feeling that some established player had not already been cast, as is sometimes the case. The role was really available; however, being screen-tested was new to me. I didn't know how it worked. They had offered Ike to Laurence Fishburne. He had turned it down—it was Tina Turner's story and he didn't know who was going to play Tina. He eventually did. From Disney's perspective, who was I? I was somebody coming up, but not a household name. I might have been fine playing roles on television, but now I would have to carry a feature film. Whether I was a household name or not, did I have enough presence to carry Tina's story? The folks in the audition room thought so, but what about the folks who were putting up the money? What about Touchstone? What about the legion of Ike and Tina fans? They didn't know who I was. Sheryl Lee Ralph, who starred in
Dreamgirls,
was also invited to screen-test. They knew she could actually act, sing
and
dance.

 

In between the audition and the screen test, I worked with Michael Peters, the movie's choreographer, to learn dance steps, and dialect coach Jessica Drake to learn Tina's accent. I also had to learn my lines for the screen test with Keith David and SamuelL. Jackson, the two guys who were up for the role of Ike after Laurence decided to pass. For about two weeks straight, I worked about fourteen hours a day learning a role I hadn't been cast in and wasn't being paid for. I had a
major
attitude!

“I don't have this job, yet I'm working like I've got this job.”

“Oh, Angela, how many hours would you like to work?” Brian Gibson, the director, would ask.

“Ten hours, doggone it—ten hours a day!”

But ten hours was not enough to accomplish everything we needed to get done, which was to learn lines, act and dance for five or six long scenes. We were going to perform “Proud Mary”—you know, “rollin' on the river.” We were going to perform Ike and Tina's first meeting. We were going to perform the scene when Ike got upset with Tina for talking about the new music she thought they ought to play, then beat and raped her.

“Just feel confident. You're really wonderful,” everyone would reassure me. “It's just got to go through what it's got to go through. Disney needs the screen test to put their stamp of approval on it. We want you to be the best you can be.” I was ticked off but kept on going. I was trying to come up in my field and was willing to put up with whatever was necessary to get there. I wasn't in shape. I was constantly tired. My body was sore and achy.

On the day of the film test, they placed me in one trailer and Sheryl in another. I heard that she had only gotten about three days to prepare. I had gotten two weeks with Michael Peters. Knowing that made me feel more confident since I was competing against a real pro. We each spent an hour or two in hair and makeup. Then for about twelve or fourteen hours we'd perform the scenes. I'd do my scene; she'd do her scene. Then I'd do a scene and she'd perform the same scene. In between scenes, the crew would change the set. We were in the house, so they made it look like a house, with a sofa, a vacuum cleaner and whatever. We were in a diner, so they made it look like a diner. We did “Proud Mary,” with the hair, yellow dress, lip-synching and klieg lights. We did the young Anna Mae Bullock, the older Anna Mae, the beat-up Anna Mae, Tina in all her glory—the Proud Mary “rollin' on the river” Tina. During the rape scene, Sam Jackson accidentally fractured my hand
dragging me across the room. By the time we were done, it felt like we had performed the whole movie. The studio executives told us they'd let us know in thirty days and we would start filming one week later.