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THere’s a weird noise coming from Tracee Ellis Ross’ Los Angeles garden. Wait, she says, looking from her computer screen to the window with an alarmed expression. “I’m going to go see that. Stand up!”
If it were a horror movie, the elegant woman who disappears into the distance will never return. But it’s not a horror movie, it’s a Zoom interview, and Ross, a Golden Globe-winning actress, best known for her role in the American comedy Black-ish, is speaking to me from the sunny living room of her home. . Or at least it was; Right now, I’m looking at a violin leaf fig and a comfortable-looking sofa.
In a youth-obsessed Hollywood, many women find that their careers decrease with age, but at 47, Ross seems to be just moving forward. The actor, activist, and entrepreneur has been in the public eye since he was 20, but began receiving serious attention only at age 40, with Black-ish. Now in its sixth season, the show focuses on an upper-middle-class African-American family, living in a mostly white Los Angeles neighborhood, starring Ross as matriarch and anesthetist Rainbow “Bow” Johnson. His uncomplicated handling of race-related problems has made comedy a cultural phenomenon. Barack and Michelle Obama are fans; Donald Trump, who tweeted that the show was racism at the highest level, is not.
A few minutes after disappearing, Ross slides back in front of his computer and makes everything clear. There is no emergency except, you know, the one we are all experiencing. At the time of speaking, LA has been under lockdown for almost a month and, like the rest of us, Ross is still struggling to understand it. “I think we are all dealing with these waves of excitement where everything seems to be fine. And then it hits you. It’s like fear is waiting right there.” She gestures towards the window.
Fear has not infiltrated his closet. Ross’s hair is combed into two princess Leia space bows and is wearing a Georgia O’Keeffe floral top. Even through the awkward interface of a Zoom call, her signature mix of silliness and glamor comes through: a willingness to mock herself that’s a big part of her on-screen appeal. As Black-ish creator Kenya Barris once said, Ross “can make expressions and physical movements that take a joke from five to ten.”
But if Ross seems sensible, his childhood was just the opposite. Her mother is Diana Ross, and her father, Robert Ellis Silberstein, is a successful music executive, who managed Ronnie Wood and Meat Loaf. As a child, she attended an elite school in Manhattan, and did a stint in the Swiss boarding school type where a typical gym class means a ski class. She did a photo shoot with Andy Warhol when she was 11, and modeled in her teens. How, I ask her, did she avoid becoming a brat?
“I’ve always been taught that you work for the things you want,” says Ross. “My mother always joked, ‘I won’t leave you any of this money. I made this money for myself! I’ll make sure there’s a roof over your head. You can have health and food insurance. But other than that …” I want to Say, I had a job in high school. I worked as a salesperson at Ralph Lauren. My mother said, ‘If you want to keep buying those clothes, you will have to figure out how to pay for them.’ There was a commitment on his part to a normality that I have had in my adult life. “
Ross speaks fondly of his family, with whom he is very close. Her parents separated when she was five, but she remained on good terms, and the childhood she shared with her siblings (four of whom were children of Diana Ross and three of Ross’s second-step siblings) sounds happy and healthy. .
Being the son of someone famous could open the door, but people on the other side have their arms crossed
“My mom always put us to bed, then went to the recording studio while we slept. She would sit with us for dinner and never leave for more than a week. “Ross recalls that her mother had the children help her make the beds, and she remains a professional in the corners of the hospital. Actually, she says. He still has some of those sheets. “I took them out of the closet at home and Mom doesn’t know I have them. They remind me of my childhood. “
But being her mother’s daughter didn’t necessarily help when it came to work. “When I started my career, being the son of someone famous was not what it is today,” says Ross. “You can open the door, but the people sitting on the other side have their arms crossed and ask,” Okay, is she as good as her mother? “
Got his first big jump as a comic on MTV The Lyricist Lounge Show in 2000. The same year, she landed a lead role in the comedy Girlfriends, which ran for eight seasons, making it the oldest live-action network action comedy of the era; but his predominantly black cast meant he was always pigeonholed as a “black show.”
“The television landscape was not the same as it is now,” Ross says. “It was still very segregated. We crossed waves in this country, celebrating black stories: in the early 2000s it was not that time. ” Despite Girlfriends’ audience size, she was not invited to late-night TV shows, award shows, or high-profile industry events. “It wasn’t about how many eyeballs were watching the show,” she says. “It was a matter of which the eyes were watching. “
Then in 2014 Black-ish appeared and “it all started happening.” In 2017, she won a Golden Globe for her role, making her the first black woman to win the award since 1983 (when Debbie Allen won for Fame). His proud family had already released a full page ad in the Hollywood Reporter to congratulate her on the nomination.
Ross says one of the things that drew her to Black-ish was the way she interrupted conventional narratives. There is a warmth and respect between Bow and her on-screen husband Andre “Dre” Johnson, which is not always evident in sitcoms. “Often, the comedy of married couples on television is about how they roll their eyes, how they get frustrated,” he says. “I never liked that.
“There are many things that made holes in the status quo, particularly as a woman of color,” she continues. “While the story is told through the eyes of man, I am not just the wife. I am not just a doctor. I am not just a mom. I am all those things. And my point of view is not seen in relation to Dre’s, it is based on my experience and my life. “
Sometimes, Ross says, Bow’s autonomy was “naturally written in the script” and sometimes she pressured it. “I am very aware of not perpetuating stereotypes,” he explains. “In one scene, if they’ve written that I’m doing ‘housework,’ like cooking, I wonder why? It’s not crucial to the story. Let Dre make the cut and I’ll either stay here on my computer, or drink a glass of wine, or I’ll hold a book. I talk and drive them crazy sometimes. But in the context of being a black woman on television, I am well aware of what those images say and the stereotypes it perpetuates. My interest is to offer other expressions, other examples, other images. “
Some of those “other images” are the experience of being a mixed race, which we don’t always see on mainstream television. “I’ve never played that in my career,” says Ross. “Even if [being half black and half Jewish]That’s what I live for. “While his character is clearly a mixed race, Black-ish did not significantly explore that facet of Bow’s identity.” He ended up being relegated to this joke space, “Ross says.” As a mixed person , you are constantly being bombarded by questions like: “Are you this or are you that?”, which is the least interesting part of being mixed … “She goes off for a second, losing her thread.” You know when you haven’t been Talking a lot? “she says.” It’s as if you lost access to words. “
She grimaces and recovers from Quarantine Voice ™ enough to explain how this particular frustration led her to co-create Mixed-ish, a prequel to Black-ish that debuted on ABC last year. While Bow’s inheritance was a comic sidenote on Black-ish, Mixed-ish centers it: Ross tells the story of Bow’s childhood, as the daughter of a black mother and a white father who grew up in the 1980s. in United States. But there was mixed criticism, and some critics deemed the show’s policy too simplistic, and it’s unclear whether it will return for a second season.
In the meantime, there is one thing Ross has not yet directed his hand to in a long and varied career. She modeled, gave a TED talk (about the power of women’s fury) and signed up as an ambassador for Time’s Up. She has appeared in music videos for Drake and Kanye West, a former neighbor. He runs his own company, Pattern, a successful hair care line for people with naturally curly hair. But there is one thing that has spent his entire life petrified: becoming a singer. “I’ve wanted to sing since I was a child,” she tells me. “But it was something I buried, because it was too scary a dream.” After all, there was a lot to accomplish.
At 47 years old, going to a studio and discovering I had a voice: that changed my life.
Many people are dealing with much worse movie releases than canceled ones, she says. “This is a little disappointment.” But still, it hurts. “At 47, going to the studio and starting singing, and discovering that I actually had a voice that could work … it changed my life.”
Did he really wait until he was 47 to start? “Quite a lot. In high school, I took the choir, it was one of the compulsory courses, and we had to perform The Pirates Of Penzance. I was furious. I was so scared to sing in front of people that I went to the principal’s office: ‘ Mrs. Regalman, I don’t think it’s fair to force someone who doesn’t want to sing and doesn’t want to be at a concert. Stage to be on stage. ” And she said she had to. So I did the play but only spoke the words. “
Ross sang in public a couple of times after that, but he says he would always add “a comedy flare or hide behind a character.” So it wasn’t until very recently that he decided “to face one of my biggest childhood fears. And, typically, I didn’t make it small: I decided to do it as the protagonist in a movie that plays a musical diva.”
A couple of months ago, Ross revealed a clip of his singing in the film, during an on-stage interview with Oprah Winfrey. Curled up in her chair in an electric blue suit, she looked on the verge of tears when the song, called Love Myself, was presented to a live audience. “I didn’t remember huddling in that chair until I looked and saw the screen,” he says. She was not the only emotional one: Oprah also cried and the audience applauded; Ross has a beautiful voice.
On-screen and off-screen, he has spent much of his career challenging established narratives. She is often asked about her single status, and has become something of an accidental spokesperson for the joy of being a single, childless woman. The idea that being a wife means having a husband and children is so deeply ingrained, she says, that most people don’t even know how inappropriate they are when they ask why she’s not married. Strangers rummaging through her uterus used to irritate her, but she no longer “cares.” It does not hurt anymore. It’s just an opportunity for me to expand someone’s world idea and add something different. Women, particularly black and brown women, are told that we must occupy a smaller area of real estate. Everything in my being and my career is about encouraging women to give themselves permission to occupy the space. I feel very comfortable making people uncomfortable. Not just for my own well-being, but hopefully so that other women don’t have to bear as much weight as my generation. “
She remains “happy and gloriously single,” but that doesn’t mean there are no men at heart. When I ask him if he received text messages from exes during the closure, something like a pandemic phenomenon, he smiles. “Oh, that definitely came up,” he says sheepishly, but won’t go into detail. “I have a very open and available heart to find the right man,” he continues. “But, you know, the old expression‘ sweep me away “seems ridiculous. I want to find a man who meets me where I am. Because, actually, I like my feet. I like them on the floor. “
Our conversation is interrupted by pinging a text message from a special man in her life. It’s your dad, wishing you a happy Easter. Ross has been making regular group calls with his family since the lockdown began. “FaceTime with my dad is like that,” she says, laughing, maneuvering the computer under her armpit. “I’m like,” I can’t see you! “And he says,” I can see you! “And I’m like:” I to know, I can not see you! “
What do you miss most about normal life? “I really miss smelling the people I love,” says Ross. “To be able to snuggle my head around my mother’s neck or my best friend’s. When I hug my best friend, it’s a full body hug. And I know what its scent is, not just its perfume, but also what it smells like. I don’t think I realized how important that is. “
Ross says the most difficult times of confinement appear to be between 10.30 p.m. and 1 a.m. It is then that the “collective trauma and strange nature” of what we are going through really hits her. “I just want something to distract me and it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s just me. Oh hi again! Hey, you!'”
There has been a bit of comfort, she says, in the violin leaf fig sitting next to it. “I’ve been talking to her a lot. At first I was a little upset because I forgot to water her for the first few weeks, a lot of leaves started to fall off. But this last week has encouraged me a little bit that maybe my father’s green thumb has been passed down genetically, after all. ” She looks at the plant with a calm expression of satisfaction. “You know, I think it’s back to a happy state.”
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