Tiffany Haddish knows how to tell a great story. When she recounted the time she, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Will Smith took a swamp tour in Louisiana it cracked up host Jimmy Kimmel and earned Haddish a partnership with Groupon. And her tale about an unnamed actor biting Beyoncé turned the whole BeyHive into a determined pack of amateur super sleuths.
This time around, Haddish is dishing on her rise to the top, and some of the people she’s encountered along the way, like disgraced comedian Roseanne Barr, her The Last O.G. co-star Tracy Morgan, and of course, the person behind the Beyoncé incident.
During her interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Haddish recounted the time she met Barr and apparently the Trump-supporting comedian wasn’t too kind.
“I don’t know if you know El Segundo [a coastal California town near LAX], but if you’re Black and you’re driving through El Segundo, you’re going to get pulled over. I used to visit my friend Anna there, and it got to a point where I was calling the police officers by name. One day, we were walking around the neighborhood, and Anna says, ‘Oh, Roseanne lives there.’ Now, I loved Roseanne, and the next day we walked by, and she was in her yard. I say, ‘Hiiii, Roseanne.’ She looks at me (makes a disgusted face), and ran in the house,” Haddish recalled.
“I thought, ‘Maybe she don’t want to be bothered today.’ A week later, we walk by again, and I told Anna — she’s Hispanic, but she looks white — she should say hi this time. So she says, ‘Hi, Roseanne,’ and Roseanne goes, ‘Hey!’ I thought, ‘Maybe she got to know us.’ Then I go back, like, a week later, I wave again and say, ‘Hi, Roseanne! I love your comedy,’ and she (makes the same disgusted face) and turns her head. I think, ‘Fuck that bitch.’ That was 2000, maybe 2001, so it’s not new. She been racist, why’d you all give her a TV show?”
When it came to Morgan, Haddish’s co-star on the TBS show The Last O.G., things are complicated. After the success of Girls Trip, TBS attempted to remake Haddish’s strait-laced character on the show to be more like her rambunctious cinematic persona and she wasn’t having it. As a result of her sudden mainstream popularity, her relationship with Morgan changed.
According to The Hollywood Reporter piece: “A few days before we meet, Haddish’s former Carmichael co-star Lil Rel Howery tweeted a link to an interview Morgan had just given, in which he shut down a question about Haddish. Rel included a message to Morgan: ‘Don’t bite the hand that keeps you relevant!’ Haddish says she tried to get her friend to take down the post, but he flat-out refused. ‘That motherf–ker’s a hater,’ Rel told her.
Other comics reached out, too, and she says she told them all the same thing: ‘You guys, chill. He’s probably just tired of hearing my name. It’s exhausting. I’m tired of hearing my name. I could see how that could be irritating, like, ‘Hello, I died, people. I’m back from the dead. Tiffany’s cool, but it’s me sitting here now. ‘So, I get it, I’m not mad about it, I love me some Tracy.’”
The wide-ranging interview covered everything from Haddish’s difficult upbringing in the foster care system, to her seemingly endless number of projects. In spite of her super interesting life, there’s one question folks really want to know: who actually bit Beyoncé?
After Haddish’s crazy Beyoncé story hit the web, many zeroed in on fellow actor Sanaa Lathan. Though Lathan has denied sinking her teeth into Queen Bey, Haddish pretty much confirmed Lathan was the woman she referenced in her story.
“I’m super good friends with her stepmom and her dad [Stan, a producer-director], and they were mad at me,” she said. “They were like, ‘Why would you do this to the family? You know, black actresses, you guys have to stick together, it’s so hard for you guys to get work as it is, why would you try to ruin her career?’ But I didn’t try to ruin her career. I never said her name! I was just trying to say how Beyoncé kept me from goin’ to jail that night. I coulda just shut my whole career down.”
Read Tiffany Haddish’s entire interview over on The Hollywood Reporter.