Initially when Fantasia Barrino was offered with the chance to reprise her role as “Celie” in “The Color Purple,” she turned down the gig.
An enormous purpose why Barrino declined is due to the very actual similarities between Celie’s life and Barrino’s, as a home violence survivor who struggled with melancholy.
Just three years after her huge break in “The Color Purple” on Broadway in 2007, she almost succumbed to her depression.
“I did not have any combat in me,” she stated in an episode of VH1’s Behind the Music that very same yr. “I did not care about something. I simply wished out. At that second I wished out.”
With Barrino’s swift rise to fame after profitable American Idol and releasing her platinum-selling album “Free Yourself” in 2004, she had no time to arrange for the whims of Hollywood. And she solely catapulted to a better degree of stardom as soon as she made it on Broadway.
“I used to be this Southern lady, inexperienced and gullible and wanting to please,” she instructed Billboard in 2016.
Certain private decisions she made early on in her profession despatched her down a darkish path. In 2010, the small print of the very public falling out between her former boyfriend and his spouse casted a damaging mild on Barrino, and across the similar time, she was battling her monetary duties.
But she was in a position to construct herself again up by strengthening her religion and committing to herself, she instructed Billboard. More than a decade later, Barrino is now fortunately married and a proud mother of three youngsters.
Yet, being offered with the chance of portraying Celie once more introduced up heavy feelings that Barrino had buried. The considered reliving Celie’s story after portraying her for eight exhibits per week again in 2007 was an excessive amount of for her.
“My life was in shambles,” Barrino instructed Variety in November. “I carried her every single day, all day, and I did not like that feeling,” she stated in reference to enjoying Celie’s character on Broadway.
It took the director of the 2023 model of the musical, Blitz Bazawule, flying out to her North Carolina dwelling and describing the imaginative and prescient of the movie, to persuade Barrino to say sure, in keeping with Variety. Now, she appears on the role as a approach to reclaim her, and Celie’s, energy and at last let go of the burdens of her previous.
“I spotted Celie was not ugly,” she instructed Variety. “Celie was not loopy. Celie was not illiterate. Nothing about her was dumb. She was the piece to the entire puzzle that saved everyone collectively.”
“I’m grateful that I didn’t enable these voices in my head to carry me again from entering into this girl’s sneakers,” she stated. “It was necessary that I did.”
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