*For years, Mary J. Blige was better known as a musician. As a musician, she has sold over 100 million albums worldwide, won nine Grammys, and is set to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in October. But unknown to many, acting was always in her blood, only that it needed to be triggered to come forth. She started acting as a child.
“When I was 7, I did a Christmas play in school, and the word from the other students and teachers was that me and this guy who was also in the play did very, very, very well,” she recently told The Hollywood Reporter.
She added: “It put something in me like, ‘Okay maybe I can really do this,’ and I always wanted to act [after] getting that feedback. At some point, I kind of left it alone and got into the music business.”
But she got into singing and quite forgot about acting, or rather, put it aside for the time being. Her acting passion was somewhat awakened after she did “The Jamie Foxx Show” in 1998, where she mixed singing and acting on the episode “Papa Don’t Preach,” which also starred Ron Isley.
“I played a character by the name of Ola Mae and the word was that I did great,” she now says. “People were blown away by my performance. And I was like, ‘Okay, I guess I could do this.’
After this, she featured “Strong Medicine,” “Ghost Whisperer,” and other projects.
“Everybody just started showing up with [projects], so I kept doing it and practicing,” she says.
But it was not until 2018 that her acting career showed its true face. Mary J. Blige received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress as Florence Jackson in “Mudbound,” directed by Dee Rees.
In 2020, her role as the ruthless “queenpin” and matriarch Monet Tejada in fellow music artist Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson’s “Power Book II: Ghost” took her a notch higher. Monet’s character inspired many memes, and now some fans address her as Monet. Her new-generation fans may easily forget that she was always a musician before she got into acting.
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