Hip hop legend Queen Latifah participated in a roundtable for The Queen Collective, a program aiming to accelerate gender and racial equality behind the camera, during the Tribeca Film Festival and shared two of her secrets behind her success: prayer and intuition.
The Oscar-nominated actress said in order to keep motivated, she turns to God.
“I pray about things before I do them … I find that I have to stop and pray often about things because I need to get quiet about something especially something big, something small, something nagging at me. I just need to kind of get quiet and pray about it for a minute,” she said.
She revealed that she relies so much on her spiritual energy for guidance that regardless of the paycheck, she isn’t down for any project that doesn’t feel right. “I’ve turned down so many deals through the years that were worth a huge amount of money because they didn’t sit right in my spirit. The guidance instinct in me said something’s not right. This is not the way necessarily, and in lieu of knowledge which I did not have because I started out at such a young age in my career, all I had was instinct.“
She continued, “The instinct was sharp though. I could pretty much feel someone’s energy, and if they weren’t right I moved right away from them, and it really guided me well. That and my partner Shakim [Compere] and my mother was the other voice in our heads.”
Latifah, born Dana Owens, also shared how her early rap career helped her navigate through hurdles in Hollywood as an up-and-coming actor. “I didn’t come into Hollywood as a Hollywood person. I came in as a rapper-turned-manager-turned-actor, so I was already a boss before I became an actor,” she said. “A lot of the things, the pressures that Hollywood puts on actors, there was no way I was going for that… I always had an attitude of I can say ‘F you’ to anyone in Hollywood.”
