Empire is coming back this week and has already been renewed for a fourth season, but even Taraji P. Henson knows that a good thing can only go on for so long.
“I could not do this forever. No. Cookie wears me out!” Henson told Variety during a recent interview.
“She drains me,” she added. “She is emotionally all over the place. Those writers, they just keep pushing my emotions with every episode. By the 18th episode [of each season], I’m dead. I got to get far away. I don’t wear animal print. I cut my hair into a bob. I don’t wear a weave because I’ve got to get as far away from Cookie as possible.”
She then joked that she only wanted Empire to stay on the air until it was syndicated, and then, “Thank you, Goodnight!”
“I learned this from the women of ‘Sex and the City’ — you’ve got to know when to go out. You don’t want to overstay your welcome. You want to go out on a high. You want to be remembered as the number one show on network,” Henson explained. “I’m going to lose my passion, I know me. And Cookie is enough. I can’t do that for so long.”
She added that she preferred film work to television work because of the focus in the television world on overnight ratings.
“I’m in a unique position on my television show, ‘Empire,’ because I think sometimes television is kind of corporate, and I’m an artist and my brain doesn’t work like that. What I mean by corporate is that it’s like a government job almost — you’re still acting, but it’s a different set-up,” she said.
“Film, I like better. You have a day to shoot one scene and you get to let it breathe, and you have one writer for your character so your character doesn’t feel schizophrenic — sometimes, my characters feel schizo on television because there are so many opinions and so much input … that’s why I like film a little better. One writer, one director, one [studio] head. Not all those voices.”