Mo’Nique didn’t bite her tongue during a recent standup show, and had a few words for Lee Daniels, Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey. Since appearing in Daniels’ film Precious, Mo’Nique has routinely talked about being blackballed by Hollywood. But this time she’s naming more names.
“No, I was not blackballed; I was white-balled by some black dicks who had no balls,” the comedian said.
“So, thank you, Mr. Lee Daniels. Thank you, Mr. Tyler Perry. Thank you, Ms. Oprah Winfrey. No, baby, I wasn’t blackballed. ... It would kill me not to say the real shit. You are not paying me equally. You are not treating me fairly. Y’all could suck my dick if I had one.”
Mo’Nique’s drama with Daniels started in 2015 when she said that she was originally supposed to be cast as Cookie in Empire but Daniels vehemently denied it.
That was also around the time Mo’Nique claimed that Daniels got her blackballed in Hollywood.
“I was offered the role in The Butler that Oprah Winfrey played,” she said. “I was also approached by Empire to be on Empire. And I was offered the role as Richard Pryor’s grandmother in [Daniels’ upcoming Pryor biopic]. Each of those things that he offered me was taken off the table.”
In his own defense, Daniels stated that Mo’Nique was the one who got herself blackballed.
“She’s brilliant, and I like working with brilliant people. … She was making unreasonable demands, and she wasn’t thinking—this was when reverse racism was happening, I think. I told her, ‘You have to thank the producers of the film, you have to thank the studios.’ And I think she didn’t understand that, and I said, ‘People aren’t going to respond well if you don’t.’”
Daniels was referring to the fact that Mo’Nique didn’t get the job offers she thought she would after winning the Oscar for Precious, which Mo’nique wrote about in the Hollywood Reporter, and how Daniels informed her that she had been blackballed because she didn’t “play the game”—meaning that that there hadn’t been heavy Oscar campaigning.
“I thought, once you won the award, that’s the top prize—and so you’re supposed to be treated as if you got the top prize,” Mo’Nique wrote.