FOXY’S PHILOSOPHY
Pam Grier is in town to introduce a film series at the Lightbox,
Pam Grier has a problem with “badass.”
Which seems odd, since she defines the term. She’s the baddest of the badass female screen stars, the shotgun-packing payback seeker in such 1970s “blaxploitation” smashes as Foxy Brown and Coffy, and also in Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 crime thriller Jackie Brown, the three films she’s introducing this week at TIFF Bell Lightbox.
“When people say ‘badass,’ and I don’t mean to be rude, but I ask them, ‘What do you mean by that?’ ’’ Grier says from the Colorado horse ranch she calls home.
“I come from a long line of skillet-throwing women. Is that what you mean? Or how about scratching? The first thing you do to your brothers who are picking on you or messing with you is you scratch ’em. That hurts. That actually hurts more than punching.”
She laughs, because she knows, you know? At 66, she’s traded her signature ’70s Afro for long silver tresses (“I’ve really owned the silver, and I love it”), but she’s forever synonymous with all things badass.
The tag line for Foxy Brown billed her as “a chick with drive who don’t take no jive!”
She’s front-and-centre on the poster for BaadAsssss Cinema, Isaac Julien’s 2002 documentary on independent black film.
She’s an everlasting influence on action queens who followed her trail-blazing anti-heroine roles, including Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in the Alien franchise and Charlize Theron’s Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road.
Grier herself says that whomever is cast to play her in Foxy, the planned biopic based on her bestselling 2010 autobiography, “they’re gonna have to bring it!”
Still, that’s not all Grier is about, as goes the title of the TIFF series that’s bringing her back to Toronto: Beyond Badass: Female Action Heroes, running until Dec. 3. (Details at tiff.net.)
She also has a large fan base for her character Kit Porter, the independent but not necessarily badass woman Grier played for six seasons on The L Word, the groundbreaking and sexually liberated TV series.
And her definition of “action” roles is as wide as pop culture. It includes just about any movie made by Katharine Hepburn and also brunette schemer Veronica Lodge in the Archie comics she devoured as a kid.
The sad fact remains, though, that even in a year that has seen numerous great female screen roles, it’s still a novelty to see a woman dominating an action picture, even more so if it’s a woman of colour.
It’s an understatement to observe that Grier isn’t happy about this.
“It pisses the f--- out of me, Peter!” she cries.
“I’m not happy with the fact that men are still seeing women as recreation. Their vaginas and their sexuality. One thing that Gloria Steinem told me was, ‘Be pretty for yourself. Put on makeup for yourself. Don’t put it on for somebody else.’ That’s being a feminist. She has been my mentor.
“I love the fact that millennials and some of the Generation Z women are getting their degrees or an education or a trade, buying their own apartment and dating and choosing. When I was in my 20s, even in high school, people were asking, ‘When are you going to get married and have kids? What’s wrong with you?’ Nothing’s wrong with me! Everything’s right with me.”
She’s proud of her blaxploitation fame but also of The L Word, which redefined love connections during its 2004-’09 run, depicting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender unions as being every bit as normal as straight ones.
The U.S. Supreme Court finally caught up to the show’s way of thinking this past summer, when it
“When I was in my 20s (. . .) people were asking, ‘When are you going to get married and have kids? What’s wrong with you?’ Nothing’s wrong with me! Everything’s right with me.” PAM GRIER
legalized gay marriage, much to Grier’s delight.
“You can’t control DNA, so if we’re all these wonderful gifts and miracles, aren’t (gay people) miracles, too? Or are there selective miracles? I try to make people think about what the f--- they say. I ask them where they got their logic from. Think! I guess that’s where my badassness is.”
One more thing to know about Pam Grier. Just because she now lives on a Colorado ranch, helping to rescue and care for abused horses, doesn’t mean she’s lost any of her street edge.
“Don’t worry about my guns,” she says with a chuckle.
“Just worry about my chainsaw!” phowell@thestar.ca