Queen Latifah: Prayer and instinct keep me motivated in Hollywood

Queen Latifah thinks before she acts.

Participating in a roundtable for The Queen Collective, a program aiming to accelerate gender and racial equality behind the camera, the Oscar-nominated actress said despite a major push in Hollywood she still finds herself frustrated at the amount of ignorance plaguing the industry.

In order to keep motivated, 49-year-old Latifah turns to God.

“I pray about things before I do them,” she said at the discussion during the Tribeca Film Festival on Friday. “I find that I have to stop and pray often about things because I need to get quiet about something—especially something big, something small, something nagging at me.”

“I just need to kind of get quiet and pray about it for a minute,” she added.

Latifah’s spiritual side plays a role in everything she does, especially when it comes to her work. No amount of money can sway her decision if something feels off.

“I’ve turned down so many deals through the years that were worth a huge amount of money because they didn’t sit right in my spirit,” she shared. “The guidance instinct in me said something’s not right. This is not the way necessarily, and in lieu of knowledge which I did not have because I started out at such a young age in my career, all I had was instinct.

“The instinct was sharp though,” she noted. “I could pretty much feel someone’s energy and if they weren’t right I moved right away from them, and it really guided me well. That and my partner Shakim [Compere] and my mother was the other voice in our heads.”

Latifah also credited her early career to helping her navigate through some of the major hurdles Hollywood can present to up-and-coming actors.

“I didn’t come into Hollywood as a Hollywood person. I came in as a rapper-turned-manager-turned-actor so I was already a boss before I became an actor,” said Latifah to a room full of laughs.

“A lot of the things—the pressures that Hollywood puts on actors—there was no way I was going for that. … I always had an attitude of I can say ‘F you’ to anyone in Hollywood.”

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