Mo’Nique broke down why she’s not just going to walk away from Netflix without a fight. (Photo by Tommaso Boddi/WireImage)
Mo’Nique has an answer to the rumor that she would have gotten more than the $500,000 Netflix offered her if she had simply auditioned. According to the “Almost Christmas” star — or rather, her husband, it’s not true.
Journalist and influencer Jawn Murray said on Facebook Live last week that the streaming giant would have given Mo’Nique $3 million for a comedy special if she tried out for the gig. But, he said, she refused, feeling as though she was too big of a star to audition for executives.
But husband Sidney Hicks denied that when speaking to “The Tom Joyner Morning Show” Monday, Jan. 29 via Black America Web.
“It’s unfortunate that with us if we don’t work and work and work and work and work, you’re out the public eye,” she says when comedian Guy Torry asked about her being “out the game” of comedy. “So, when someone says, ‘Well, what have you done lately?’ when you’re Black, but when you’re white it’s, ‘You’re only as good as your last project.’ So why is it different for me?”
As for a caller who asked why she won’t just move on from Netflix’s $500,000 offer instead of boycotting, she says “When they make you an offer that is not fair and you know that your white counterparts have been offered more, do you speak up about it or do you simply move on?”
When the caller responded that it “depends” on the options, Hicks stepped in to explain that accepting less was like accepting that you, as a Black person, are worth a fraction of what your white counterparts are worth.
A final caller then asked, “Why should broke people care about rich people’s financial problems?” Mo’Nique broke things down as an equality issue, not a socioeconomic one.
“This is called an equality problem and we’re acting like it’s brand new,” she says. “So if we keep standing and saying, ‘We need equality,’ it just so happens, people in our community hear $500,000 and they’re saying, ‘Mo’Nique, are you crazy? Why didn’t you just take that money?’ But people are disregarding that our sister Amy Schumer was offered $11 million.”
Mo’Nique added that Schumer negotiated for more and won support from many. She also corrected co-host Sybil Wilkes’s assertion that the comic hasn’t garnered support — “that’s unfair to the people that are, because there are a whole lot of people saying, ‘sister, we stand with you.'”
“Tell me about all the support Harriet Tubman had? If you go back in history tell me about all the support that Fannie Lou Hamer had? … We’ve been so conditioned to believe we’re supposed to get less that when someone says, ‘Hey, guys, this isn’t fair…’ [we don’t speak out].”
