‘I had to stop therapy. I needed the pain’: Fantasia Barrino on trauma, triumph and filming The Color Purple
‘I wasn’t going to show my face,” Fantasia Barrino says, speaking on a video call from Los Angeles. “But I was like: ‘How rude. I can see her pretty face.” Born and raised in High Point, a small city in North Carolina, Barrino, 39, is famous in the US as the teenage single mother who won American Idol 20 years ago. Now, she is going global, playing Celie in the new musical screen adaptation of The Color Purple, produced by Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey. A star could go any which way with that kind of rags-to-riches story, but you would expect at least a little showbiz haughtiness. I have never met a warmer person in my life. “I’m a Cancer, so I believe in loving and hugging and taking care of everybody,” she says later.
It is hard to think of a story that more encourages compassion than The Color Purple. Alice Walker’s prize-winning epic novel, published in 1982, is the story of downtrodden women surviving the first half of the 20th century in rural Georgia. It starts with rape, incest and teenage pregnancy and moves through loss, estrangement, domestic violence and the brutality of a racist state. It is the last thing you might imagine setting to music, except that the way it resolves – complicated, painful, unvarnished, harmonious – is musical.
It feels more recent, more live, now than it did when it was published, partly because so many people then were pretending that racism was a historical relic. Barrino did a Q&A about the film recently with Winfrey, who asked which one word the cast would use to describe it. “I said: ‘Healing.’ She’s, like: ‘Wait a minute.’ But, yeah, we were being healed. I was healed. I had just started therapy when we started shooting and I had to stop it. I needed the pain – and Celie healed me.”
This is not the first time Barrino has played Celie. At 23, she was on Broadway. “That was my first time ever seeing a Broadway show,” she remembers. “They took me to eat, said: ‘We want you to be Celie,’ and I’m thinking: ‘Are you crazy? Are you drunk? Is something wrong?’”
It wasn’t easy. She had left school at 14 and had no training. “At that time in my life, I didn’t know how to come out of character,” she says. “I took Celie home with me; I woke up with Celie. I cried all the time. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go back to that. But I’m so glad that I didn’t allow fear to hinder me from who Celie is now. Brilliant, strong, wise, smart, beautiful; all the things that I did not get to see, playing her at the age of 23. I’ve got to see her in a different way, probably because of where
I am in life – the woman I’ve become.” That woman is a mother of three, with “a bonus son” and two grandchildren through her husband, the entrepreneur Kendall Taylor.
The musical has not been without controversy. Cast members have complained that normal set standards weren’t observed: they weren’t catered for, they didn’t have transport and their pay was low. The implication is that the film, made almost entirely by people of colour, was done on a shoestring, underpinned by racism. The person