Mary J ditches the diva to bare her soul

HIP-HOP soul queen Mary J. Blige threw everything she had into playing a cotton farmer’s wife battling to keep her family from being ripped apart in the post-war deep American South. In the Netflix film Mudbound, Ms Blige plays Florence Jackson who, along with her husband and children, are subjected to horrifying acts of racism as they work in the cotton fields on the Mississippi Delta. She arrived on director Dee Rees’s set straight from performing on a Bad Boy Reunion tour. ‘I was fresh off the plane so it was hard adjusting. You don’t realise how vain you are until you have to play a character like Florence who’s stripped down to nothing,’ Ms Blige (left) told me after she’d received back-to-back best supporting actress nominations from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Golden Globe Awards and the Screen Actors Guild. Initially, Blige resisted some of the director’s suggestions for how Florence should look. ‘Dee put her foot down and said, “Well, Florence needs to be natural and beautiful and strong.” She was insistent and said that she did not want Mary J. Blige. She wanted Florence. I fought a little, but then I understood her vision.’

That meant no wigs. ‘And no lashes. No nothing, except a little make-up to make me look a little older and like a sharecropper’s wife who’d been working in the blazing sun.

‘I realised I had nothing to lose so I gave everything I had. My good and my bad. I just let it all hang out — and playing her really liberated me,’ she added.

Whatever she gave Florence, it worked. When I first saw Mudbound at the Toronto International Film Festival I was stunned by how Blige was able to disappear completely into her role. Based on Hillary Jordan’s 2008 novel told from the point of view of members of two families — one black, one white — the film also stars a superb Carey Mulligan.

Though Blige was born in the Bronx, she lived for a time with her grandmother in Georgia. ‘My grandmother could be that woman (Florence)! Putting up with the racism. I was too young to fully know what was going on. Nothing I experienced relates to that,’ she said.

Blige will face strong competition from equally sublime performances by Allison Janney in I, Tonya and Laurie Metcalf in Lady Bird.

Blige said she wants to do more film work, but she’ll be back in the recording studio in 2018 to work on a new album.

‘That’s my baby. I’m not going to give that up.’