On a Wednesday night in midtown New York, generations X by Z spill out of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre to cluster across the venue’s aspect stage door. They’re ready for Taraji P Henson.
“I feel like I’m Cardi B on tour,” Henson jokes. When we speak over a video name this April, the actor is one week out from the opening evening of her Broadway debut within the revival of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Throughout the present’s preview interval, Henson has made an effort to make it out to avenue stage after performances to shake arms, take photos and signal playbills. “It’s good to see my fans like this, up close and personal,” she says.
Over the previous 30 years, Henson has grow to be a Hollywood mainstay for her considerate character work. She’s been a hip-hop soul star in Hustle & Flow, an ardent adoptive mom in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and a groundbreaking Nasa mathematician in Hidden Figures. She’s additionally a four-time Emmy-nominated, Golden Globe-winning, Oscar-nominated actor and a Tony-nominated producer. But Henson’s formal coaching is in theater, and it’s right here she really thrives. “I got that good Howard [University] training,” she says of her alma mater, the place she studied drama within the 90s. “[I was] made for the stage.”
It might look like Henson waited to come to Broadway. But in fact, Broadway was ready for her – and when it was prepared, all it took was a 20-minute telephone name from Debbie Allen, the veteran actor, choreographer and film-maker. After Denzel Washington, a steward of August Wilson’s works, tapped Allen to helm the stage and display screen revival of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, she started to assemble her gamers.
“Joe Turner found me. [My character] Bertha found me,” Henson recollects. She takes a beat, then launches into an eerily spot-on Allen impression, raspy drawl and all. “Debbie called me and was like, ‘Taraji, I got something for you! How do you feel about doing Miss Bertha in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, honey? We gon’ do the film, but we gotta do this Broadway play first, honey.’ And I said, ‘Well, Debbie, anything for you. All you had to do was say August Wilson, and I’m in.’ It was that easy.”
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is the fourth play in August Wilson’s traditional Century Cycle, set in 1911 Pittsburgh. The authentic forged included Black luminaries similar to Delroy Lindo and Angela Bassett. Today, Henson leads the star-studded forged of the Allen-directed revival alongside Cedric The Entertainer, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, an actor and playwright, and Joshua Boone, a Broadway star. Henson portrays Bertha Holly, the devoted matriarch of a boarding home she runs along with her husband Seth. Bertha and Seth care for their boarders with a parental attentiveness that’s empowering, loving and protecting, fostering an atmosphere ripe for self-discovery: an eternal observe for descendants of slaves.
The characters in Joe Turner are, at most, just one technology faraway from slavery. Most transfer up north in pressing pursuit of id, stability, prosperity and connection, solely to discover that the afterlife of slavery is ubiquitous: in every intentional scene, Joe Turner’s characters are confronted with fixed reminders of slavery’s destruction. The foundational matting on which these characters tread is a motley patchwork woven of the free Black migrant’s desires, religion, grief, integrity, needs, trauma and invincible pleasure.
There’s numerous components of Joe Turner that, tragically, nonetheless apply to our personal 2026 setting, just like the theme of displacement. “Families are being pulled apart right now as we speak,” Henson says. “Somebody who is being detained by ICE right now just disappeared. Whole families are being wrecked. That’s crazy to me.”
It’s a play additionally steeped in Black spirituality, each Hoodoo and Christianity, particulars that Henson says audiences “didn’t understand” when it first opened in 1988 on the similar theatre the place the 2026 manufacturing is staged. But now we’re in a post-Sinners world, one the place comprehension of the spectrum of African-American religion has been expanded on a mainstream scale: in 2025, Ryan Coogler’s religious thriller invited audiences to interact in a cultural meditation on Black faith exterior of the Christian church with its insightful depiction of the sacred observe of Hoodoo.
“That’s Black people, period. That’s just who we are,” Henson says. “You could take us, snatch us from a whole continent, and what you not gon’ do is disconnect us from the Creator.”
To Henson, the play’s central message is a name to motion. “It is very important in your lifetime to find your purpose, whatever that is. Nobody can give it to you,” she says. “Everybody has a purpose. [The character Bynum] talks about it as a ‘song’. Because once you find your purpose, you’re going to want to sing about it, you’re going to want to tell the world about it, because now you’re going to impregnate somebody else with their purpose. And it’s all connected to God, connecting yourself back to the Creator, love and laughter … There’s so much to be learned from [the play], but I think the overall theme is making sure love is in that purpose.”
Henson believes that her Broadway debut was divine timing and a lesson – or reminder – in embracing her personal objective. “I still have a love for the craft. I’m a producer, I have a production company, [so] I’m behind the curtain,” Henson explains. “The wizard doesn’t exist for me any more. The rose-colored glasses are off. So now I understand the business, and a lot of times the business involves politicking. That takes the artistry out of me. It wears me thin and it makes me question, ‘Why am I doing this?’ Because it doesn’t make me happy, having to fight and scrap and scrape for a dollar and my worth. That’s exhausting.”
In 2023, Henson made headlines by opening up about how the pay disparity for Black ladies in Hollywood had affected her profession. “I’m just tired of working so hard, being gracious at what I do [and] getting paid a fraction of the cost,” Henson said on the time. Henson tells me immediately that the final time she felt such a excessive stage of burnout was when she left the CBS drama Person of Interest in 2013, feeling “empty”, disillusioned and questioning her profession. She walked away from the display screen and as an alternative joined the forged of the Nineteen Thirties-set play Above the Fold on the Pasadena Playhouse, as a check of her devotion to and compatibility with the craft of appearing. She was looking out for the spark, and theater was her refuge.
“I brought Hollywood to me in Pasadena, that was the difference,” Henson says. “That’s how I got Cookie [in Lee Daniels’ hit TV show Empire], because Fox [executives] kept coming to that play.”
Watching Henson on stage, it is sensible why these execs saved coming again: her magnetism is irresistible. As Bertha she pulls off a hat-trick, showcasing her emotional depth as an actor, her spectacular singing abilities in addition to her pure knack for improv.
“I think the night you came, I dropped flour,” Henson says, referring to a kitchen scene through which Bertha prepares biscuits whereas speaking to her husband. “I came home and beat myself up like crazy. Then I called my friend. [They] was like, ‘Taraji, you are so busy in that kitchen. Why would an audience member not think that dropping the flour is normal?’ I cleaned it up, and no one noticed. No one.”
She laughs breezily, her voice echoing off the partitions. “That’s what’s so beautiful about live theater: you have to stay in it. You can’t say, ‘Oh fuck, I dropped the flour, oh shit!’ [Then] I’m Taraji. I have to stay Bertha and I have to work it out.”
Bertha Holly looks like she was written particularly for Henson, a match Allen discerned earlier than Henson did. “I understood why [Allen] called on me to be Bertha,” she says. “A lot of characters I’ve portrayed in my career have been the glue, the moral compass [like Bertha].” Allen’s express belief in Henson has been reciprocated tenfold, making for an intimate actor-director dynamic and blossoming friendship that Henson calls a “safety net”.
“And whenever I’m safe, I’m uninhibited,” she says. “You want an artist to explore, to feel free and safe enough to go there, to just forget that they’re acting … You just want to make [Allen] proud.”
Henson treats each evening like opening evening, however is self-aware sufficient to stability strict self-discipline with relaxation and gratitude. “This Broadway moment forced me to really sit down and pat myself on the back … that’s why I’m glad I came now,” she says, getting teary-eyed. “This is years of my hard work and me putting everything I have into all of these characters that I portray and earning the trust of my audience. It is hard out here. People are barely getting by, eggs and gas and groceries and insurance [are expensive]. So when people come out of their pockets to purchase a ticket that has my name on it, I’m going to give them everything I got.”
Since previews started, Henson has met of us by the busload who traveled to New York with their church buildings or their universities, or flown in from California or Texas, to see her in her Broadway debut (the present’s run has been prolonged twice). Seeing her tangible influence as an artist by her audiences was not merely re-affirmation, however a brand new definition of success. She’s not inserting her worth as a performer in a gold-plated statuette.
“I’m very hard on myself,” Henson says. “The industry can play a game with your mind and make you think you’re not worthy because you don’t have ‘the gold’. I don’t care who got that gold. Are they coming to see you like this? I’m so giving of my gift to the world, and the world sees it. That’s why they show up for me. And that’s [worth] more than man-made gold.”
