Taraji P. Henson Speaks On Her Oscar Nomination

EbonyJet.com caught up with Taraji P. Henson to discuss a number of topics, including the Oscar buzz surrounding her new film “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”       

“I feel honored but, you know, I just want to leave that alone. I’ll just leave that up to the stars (laughs),” she tells the Web site.      

The actress stars as the adoptive mother of Button (Brad Pitt), who is born old and gets younger as everyone around him grows older. In January, she follows up with her lead role alongside Morris Chestnut in Not Easily Broken, based on the T.D. Jakes novel about a couple trying to save a troubled marriage.        

Henson – who also spoke to EbonyJet.com about those upcoming films – began the interview by discussing the challenges of dealing with “Benjamin Button’s” special effects.     

EBONY/JET: Because of the nature of the movie there are very few scenes in Button that don’t a special effect of some kind. How do you play off a scene reacting to a person who isn’t there and make it look convincing?

HENSON: Well what they did, which was very smart, was they hired actors of various sizes to portray Benjamin Button at different ages and the actors wore a blue sock over their heads with the faces cut out and the blue sock represented the green screen on which they would then digitally transpose Brad Pitt’s face. So it wasn’t like I had someone standing off camera I was reading lines to. There were actors giving me things I could respond to. So once Brad did his work and they CGI’d his face over it, it worked!

EBONY/JET: What’s the process you use portraying a character that ages during the course of the film starting off as a young, vivacious woman and ending up at the end as an old woman?

HENSON: Well you definitely have to research what’s going on in each decade because that’s what molds us, shapes us, as we grow. We’re different people now, I mean we’ve got our first black president, things that happened in the environment that shaped and molded you. But also I had to research what happens physically to a person, to a body as it ages, what part of her body is going to cause her the most grief. And once I did the research and picked the certain part of the body that would be affected, I committed myself to it.

Read the entire EbonyJet.com article here.