Mary J. Blige is on the cover of W magazine new Art issue.
In her interview, she talks about her role in Mudbound, challenges faced and where she sees her career going.
The Singer revealed that the movie helped her realize how excessively concerned she was about her appearance.
“I didn’t realize how vain I was until I started working on Mudbound. Once I saw how my character, Florence, lived [in a shack on a farm in Mississippi], I thought, Wow, I’m really a vain person. When I went to the movie set to do the first day of fittings, I was Mary J. Blige: I had just done a tour and a show, so I was all, you know, I had wigs and weaves and all sorts of things going on, and Dee Rees was like, ‘No! We want to see you. You can’t have a perm, you’re going to have minimal, minimal makeup.’ And I was like, ‘What about lashes?’ And she said no, and I was like, ‘Really? Florence doesn’t have lashes?’ That part was a lot.”
She further said she hopes to get to a point where she’s finally at peace with herself.
“I want, at some point, to not have to work so hard. I want peace of mind and acceptance of self, totally. I know that’s an ongoing process, so every single day I’m working on that, and it’s been hard ever since this challenge I’m having with this divorce. It was such a terrible thing. It made me see myself as ‘I have to be better than this’: I was never good enough; I was never pretty enough, smart enough. And there was someone chosen over me. It was like, I can’t stay, but it really let me see, Mary, you are better than that. You have to continue to grow.”
