‘Proud’ star’s Twitter coup

TARAJI P. Henson says Twitter — not an Academy Award nomination — helped her realize she was an international star. “It wasn’t when I was nominated for an Oscar. That’s not why I got into acting. For me, it was when social media became prevalent,” Henson told Page Six. “When Twitter came about . . . I knew I was successful in the States, but I kept being told by the industry, ‘You won’t sell overseas.’ They kept saying, ‘Black movies don’t do well over there.’ Hip-hop music — clearly — does well over there. Why can’t a movie do well?” She says that when she “joined Twitter [in 2009] and I started getting all these tweets from all these different continents and I’m like, ‘ Wait a minute here, you mean to tell me you know this movie in China?’ So, then I was like, ‘So, somebody is lying.’ And I remember . . . if you go back on my Twitter feed . . . I said, ‘I’m going to be an international star. I’m going to prove to this industry that a black woman can not only sell a movie domestically, but we can do it overseas. And a black woman, who looks, sounds and talks like me.” She further told us at a Hennessy VSOP Privilege dinner at Zuma to promote her film “Proud Mary,” “Years kept going and going and ‘Empire’ hit. That’s what took me overseas.” Henson has over 5.2 million Twitter followers. She said of her new movie, which also stars Danny Glover in the story of a hitwoman working for an organized crime family: “This movie is so important . . . in a time when women feel like victims because of the men or whoever . . . you have Proud Mary say, ‘Take your power back!’ Because in this film . . . she’s fighting all men and she kills them all,” she said. “Page Six TV” star Bevy Smith hosted a Q&A with Henson.