Janelle Monáe is shooting for the stars.
After carving out her own unique corner of the pop world, the six-time Grammy nominee has ascended to Hollywood stardom with memorable performances in two of the year’s hottest films, Moonlight and Hidden Figures.
“I allow the universe to rearrange and reinvent me,” she said in American Way magazine’s February issue. “I have had a gathering phase.”
But when the universe came to her with the script for Hidden Figures, a true-to-life film about the African-American women who helped put a man in space, Monáe — who has said that she plans to release new music in 2017 — was already four years into her highly anticipated next album, and she had no plans to delay that work.
Fortunately, she read the script. “I was a bit puzzled and upset that, as a young woman of color, I had no clue who these women were,” she told the magazine. “I knew that I needed to drop what I was doing and make sure that no other young girl or boy would go on without knowing about these brilliant women who helped get America into space.”
In the film, Monáe plays Mary Jackson, one of the real-life African-American women who helped NASA put John Glenn into orbit in 1962. “I think we’re all — no matter what gender, what race you are — you can’t look at these women and not see the genius and see that they’re American heroes,” she previously told PEOPLE.
With limited acting experience outside of some voice work in Rio 2 — and of course, her captivating music videos (see above) — Monáe worked with an acting coach to make sure she brought the same spunkiness she embodies onstage to the big screen. “I did not want it to seem that I am just a musician-artist who was sent a script. I had to audition,” she said. “I wanted to honor these three women to the best of my ability.”
Hidden Figures performed strongly at the box office and with critics. The film was nominated for multiple awards — it’s up for Best Picture at the Oscars later this month — and took home the SAG award for outstanding performance by a cast, beating out Monáe’s other breakthrough film this year, Moonlight.
She made her official big-screen debut with Moonlight last fall, playing a drug dealer’s girlfriend and confidant to the film’s hero, Chiron, played by Ashton Sanders. Like Hidden Figures, Monáe felt an immediate attraction to the coming-of-age story set in a tough neighborhood of Miami.
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