Oscar winner told she was ‘blackballed’

Precious star Mo’Nique, ‘didn’t play the game’

Five years ago, when comedian Mo’Nique won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in Precious, she thanked the academy for “showing it can be about the performance, not the politics.”

Now, in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, she says that perhaps politics have played a role in her career trajectory since that win.

Mo’Nique did not campaign for her Oscar, did not go to a thousand lunches and pose with a thousand people. And so, “I got a phone call from (director) Lee Daniels maybe six or seven months ago. And he said to me, ‘Mo’Nique, you’ve been blackballed.’ And I said, ‘I’ve been blackballed? Why have I been blackballed?’ And he said, ‘Because you didn’t play the game.’ And I said, ‘Well, what game is that?’ And he gave me no response.”

When asked what Daniels meant, she said, “You know what I learned? Never to think what somebody else was thinking. That’s a question you would have to ask Lee Daniels.”

According to the A.V. Club website, Mo’Nique was criticized in the media in 2010 for refusing to attend award-season parties and glad-hand Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences voters, reportedly because she asked to be paid for each appearance.

Daniels responded to the Hollywood Reporter: “Mo’Nique is a creative force to be reckoned with. Her demands through Precious were not always in line with the campaign. This soured her relationship with the Hollywood community. I consider her a friend. I have and will always think of her for parts that we can collaborate on. However, the consensus among the creative teams and powers thus far were to go another way with these roles.”

Mo’Nique listed a number of offers that went away:

“Well, actually, I was offered the role in The Butler that Oprah Winfrey played. I was also approached by Empire to be on Empire. And I was also 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. They all just went away. But that’s just part of the business, you know?”

She added, “I get asked that question a lot: How did the Oscar change my life? What it did was that it gave me a new reality.”