Nobody’s Fool star is ready to take on the world
What’s the best thing that’s happened to Tiffany Haddish in the past year? Tough question. She takes a deep breath. “Meeting Oprah, getting a Tesla, hosting the MTV Movie and TV Awards, winning awards, going on trips, staying in different countries, getting an award in Canada. Going to Africa was really super awesome.
“Getting to meet my aunties and cousins that I hadn’t met before. Having the funds to get my mother out of a mental institution — that’s freaking amazing — and getting her the best doctors. Being able to afford to take care of my grandmother. That’s really better than everything.”
A year after her breakout role in Girls Trip, Haddish is indeed busy. Up next is the Tyler Perry-written-and-directed comedy Nobody’s Fool, which pairs her with Tika Sumpter. They play sisters, with Whoopi Goldberg as their mom. Once Haddish’s character gets out of jail, they discover that Sumpter’s boyfriend is catfishing her. Nobody’s Fool, out Friday, will test just how much Haddish audiences want. It’s her third film in theatres in just the last month, following Night School (which paired her with her longtime mentor Kevin Hart) and Ike Barinholtz’s dark indie comedy The Oath. Plus, in September, she was a standout at the Emmys, where she won for hosting Saturday Night Live. (She was the first black female comic to host.)
With blistering speed, Haddish has become one of Hollywood’s most in-demand talents. Everyone from Paul Thomas Anderson to Judd Apatow (who’s interested in adapting Haddish’s memoir, The Last Black Unicorn) wants to work with her. She’s also prepping a Netflix standup special, developing a sitcom with Danielle Sanchez-Witzel (The Carmichael Show) and readying season 2 of The Last O.G. with Tracy Morgan. Haddish’s ubiquity this fall has been the culmination of her inspiring rise from a difficult upbringing to the highest reaches of show business.
The 38-year-old comedian has said she was abused as a child before entering foster care, and later was briefly homeless while trying to make it in standup in Los Angeles. But her confidence in her future never wavered; Haddish’s production company is named after her personal slogan: She Ready. “People always say, ‘Are you surprised?’ No, I’m not surprised. I manifested this,” Haddish said earlier this fall. “This is part of my list of goals.
“I’m grateful I’ve accomplished this much so far, but there’s so much more I want to do. I want to build my own studio one day. I’ve got my little production company going and I want to create things that inspire people to be their best selves.”
Yet as much as Haddish has been accomplishing, some objectives have remained elusive.
“Still trying to get pregnant by Leonardo DiCaprio,” she says. “He’s not giving me the time of day right now but he’ll come around.” Haddish’s telling of her encounter with DiCaprio is exactly what has made her so beloved: She’s radically unfiltered and unapologetically herself. If she wants to wear an Alexander McQueen red-carpet dress over and over again, she will. At a time when comedy has struggled mightily at the box office, Haddish has proven the great exception. Night School was the first traditional comedy in more than two years to open No. 1. Nobody’s Fool isn’t expected to manage the same feat; it opens against Bohemian Rhapsody and The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, and unlike those films, Nobody ’s Fool isn’t being screened in advance for critics.
But there could be considerable potency still in the combination of Haddish and Perry, a box-office powerhouse himself.