Retta is tired of being typecast as the ‘sassy’ Black woman
"Good Girls" actress, Retta says she's is tired of her "Parks and Rec" catch phrase and being typecast as the "sassy" Black women in films.
Four years after NBC’s hit sitcom, Parks and Recreation has ended, fans of the sitcom can’t resist stopping one star on the street to utter one of her famous lines: “Treat yo’ self!”
Retta, who played office manager Donna in the Pawnee Parks and Recreation Department, said people still scream the line at her whenever they see her and across social media, according to BuzzFeed News. The catchphrase became famous in the Season 4 episode “Pawnee Rangers” when Donna’s character and Tom Haverford, played by Aziz Ansari, celebrate a day each year where they treat themselves to expensive items.
“It has slowed down so it’s not as tiresome,” Retta explained.
Yet it still persists. Although Retta said she doesn’t mind the love her fans show her, she just wants it to be at the right moment.
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“You know, you go to dinner, and at the end of the night the waiter says, ‘I just wanna say, “Treat yo’ self!’” I don’t mind that,” Retta said. “It’s just when someone comes out of nowhere and is in my face and you’re like, ‘Hi, I’m a human being. Could you not put your breath in my eye?’
“It’s really those people that just pop out of nowhere,” she added in the BuzzFeed News interview, “and then I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m trying to pee.””
Another thing that gets the Good Girls actresses’ goose going is when she feels typecast for a role, particularly when a character is pegged as “sassy,” a term all too familiar and unequally applied to Black women.
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“One of my least favorite adjectives, descriptors used for parts that I have to go in for, is ‘sassy,'” Retta explained. “I don’t know what it is. I have this aversion to it. When I see it, I assume something, I assume what I think they want, and I don’t wanna be a part of it.”
Retta’s full interview can be viewed on Facebook Watch on Sunday, June 9th at 8AM ET.
