Sitting across from Meagan Good in an Udon shop in West Hollywood on a Monday night, I feel a slight sense of embarrassment for a couple of reasons. One, it’s Megan Good— an actress whose roles based on 17 films alone have brought in more than $1 billion at the box office— and I’ve asked her to meet me at a random Japanese restaurant which Yelp says you only need two dollar-signs worth of money to afford because the music at the swanky bar where we’d originally planned to chat was too loud.

            The second reason is that I’m interviewing her for what will be her first solo ESSENCE cover ever, and for a 41-year-old Black woman who’s been acting since the age of 10, the math, for me, isn’t quite mathing. Yet as we talk about her career trajectory over the past three decades, I realize overlooked isn’t quite the right word to describe what I’m projecting Good’s experience to be as an actress. 

In 1998, the then-budding thespian was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Youth Actor/Actress for her breakout performance in Eve’s Bayou, which she filmed at the age of 14. In 2013, she landed the lead role on her own NBC drama Deception, and she’s stood out in every ensemble comedy she’s been cast in from Deliver Us from Eva, Think Like a Man and Think Like a Man Too, to her current role on Harlem. Underestimated is where I land as Good’s retelling of her experience in Hollywood bring us to her having to fight for the opportunity to read for the role of Camille on the Prime Video series. Yet as I sit with the weight of what I perceive to be an exhausting reality, I notice her rosy cheeks are lifted, and she has a smile on her face as she talks.

            “I take it as a challenge,” Good says. “I can still change people’s minds about me, and I don’t look at that as a bad thing. I look at that as a purpose thing.”

Good has been changing people’s perception of her since she was a young girl growing up in Panorama City, Los Angeles. At the age of four, Good’s mother involved her and her sister, La’Myia Good–Bellinger, in acting as a way to expose them to the world outside of their predominately white neighborhood.

            “When we met with my first manager, she didn’t even want me,” Good recalls. “She was like, ‘She ain’t ready yet.’ She wanted La’Myia so our mom was like, ‘Go convince her that you want to do this.’”

            Good succeeded at doing so, booking commercials for Marshall’s, McDonald’s, and Barbie, and as an extra in the 1988 science fiction action horror They Live. Thirteen is the age when Good says she started acting seriously, which left her with few contemporaries as she built her career in the mid-90s and early 2000s.

            “I feel like I fall in a unique space,” she says. “Growing up, me and Christina Milian and Zoe Saldaña were up for a lot of the same things. But also, being Black women, we kind of merged. We could be anywhere between 32 to 43. I kind of feel like we’re all somewhere around the same age of 37.”

            Still the support of older actresses was crucial to Good getting her foot in the door and making sure it remained open. It was Gabrielle Union, she says, who helped her land the role of baby sister Jacqui Dandridge in 2003’s Deliver Us From Eva. At 19 years old, the decision-makers behind the project thought she was too young to play the part.

            “After we were done rehearsing, she went to the head of Sony Screen Gems and was like, ‘I love this girl. She’s great. You guys need to hire her.’ And from that relationship alone, I did You Got Served, D.E.B.S., Stomp the Yard, Think Like a Man, and Think Like a Man Too. I’ve done more movies with Screen Gems than I’ve done with any other studio.”

            When Good was ultimately given the chance to read for the role of Camille on Harlem – which she earned by asking how creator Tracy Oliver envisioned the character and showing up to the audition with burgundy goddess locs that took 11 hours to create the night before – she called on former co-star Regina Hall, to practice her lines.

            “She said, ‘I saw you in Love by the Tenth Day, you’re good. I was like, ‘I know, but I would just really love to run it with you,’ and she said, ‘I would absolutely love to.’”

            Things weren’t quite as simple when it came to Good being cast as Darla Dudley in the upcoming DC Comics superhero film Shazam! Fury of the Gods.

            “I’d been in front of those people millions of times, but when I decided I really wanted to do DC or Marvel, my mom was like, ‘Well, what are you doing to meet God halfway?’ So, I got in the gym, and I made it part of my lifestyle for the next year and a half. When I went into that audition room, I had no idea what I was auditioning for. They wanted me to act like a kid and I was like, ‘That’s easy.’ They called me back two weeks later and said, ‘You got the part, and it’s Shazam. DC Universe,’” Good recalls.

            “It’s funny because they were saying, ‘She looks incredible, it’s the best she’s ever looked.’ And because I came in physically looking like that, and I had a great audition, they were like, ‘We see it.’ But it’s been there the whole time,” she adds.

            “Black girls, we don’t get, ‘Let’s hire her now and put her in the gym with a trainer and get her where she needs to be.’ You don’t get to get there and figure it out. You’ve got to come already ready.”

Figuring it out is something Good has always managed to do, even in situations when she didn’t immediately realize what she was being prepared for. As we talk, she draws an interesting connection between the anguish she experienced when she was accused of bleaching her skin in 2020 and the calmness she felt when news of her divorce went public in 2021.

            In short, an unlicensed esthetician recommended products to Good to address sun damage that ended up severely lightening her overall skin tone. The public immediately accused the actress of intentionally bleaching her normally rich brown skin to make it lighter and, recognizing how drastically her complexion had changed, Good says she felt she had no rebuttal.

            “I was like, I look so crazy I just have to sit in this, and let people think what they want to think, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

            “But I remember when I was praying, I felt a peace come over me, and I was like, ‘this is an answer to a prayer,’ she adds. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but my concern with what other people thought about me was such a thing that I had to go through something like that where I literally had no other option, and I had to find my joy and my peace regardless of what everyone was thinking.”

            Good’s complexion did eventually return, and with it came a new outlook – one that decentered everyone else’s opinions about who they think she is.

            “I had to be put in that place in order for me to get as free as I am now,” she says. “By the time I got to the divorce and all of that, it was like ‘I’m okay.’

            On December 21, 2021, Good and ex-husband Devon Franklin announced that they were divorcing after nine years of marriage. The decision, she shares, wasn’t hers.

            “It’s nothing that I would have ever chosen, and when I realized that it was happening, I was devastated. I was like, ‘This is me, Lord. I did everything that I could do to the best of my ability. I don’t understand why I did all these things, and then this is my end result.’”

            Good, who still considers Franklin “an incredible and beautiful person,” makes it a point to say there was never anything malicious done on either of their parts to hurt the other. As some suspected, this wasn’t about her not wanting children, she still does. And nothing about the book they published in 2017, The Wait: A Powerful Practice for Finding the Love of Your Life and the Life You Love, was the least bit dishonest, she adds, though the circumstances of their union caused her to temporarily question that path.

            “I struggled with that,” she admits. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I should be celibate now. I don’t know what I should do.’ I even was at a point early on when I felt, obviously, I still believe in Jesus, but I’m not sure what to believe about anything else anymore.”

            Six months after announcing their split, Good and Franklin’s divorce was finalized on June 23, 2022. Their 10-year wedding anniversary was just seven days prior.

            “That was rough because my biggest fear was what happened between my mom and my dad would to happen to me, which is you’ve been with your husband for 10 years and you break up. I would say, ‘I’m never getting divorced. I’m in it forever, good, bad, whatever it is, I’m never going to give up. You’re my person, I’m your person, that’s it.’

            “It took me a long time to understand that God didn’t do divorce,” she adds. “DeVon and I both have free will. So, I had to accept that God didn’t lie when he told me that was my husband. That was my husband. But he didn’t say we’d be together forever. God’s word remains true no matter what happens to you and if anything changes, it’s because sometimes life deals you cards you don’t expect or anticipate, but He’ll still bring you through it and He still has an incredible plan for your life.”

            In coming to that place of understanding, Good says she has no regrets in regard to her marriage or its dissolution.

            “Once I accepted everything, I felt grateful for the time we had together and the beautiful journey. Then there was an excitement. I get to start life all over again, in my prime, with so many incredible things happening in my life and in my career. I get to do this again.”

It’s indeed an invigorating time for Good personally and professionally. One reason is she’s finally able to merge those worlds in a meaningful way, thanks to her close relationship with Harlem co-stars Grace Byers, Jerrie Johnson, and Shoniqua Shandai as well as Oliver, Executive Producer Mimi Valdés and writer Scott King.

            “I’ve never hung out with my bosses after work and got a drink and had a real talk about life, not just what’s going on at work,” Good shares. “I’ve watched a lot of other actors have that relationship with producers of their show or movies where they kind of move like a unit. I always felt left out of that community so when I gained it, I was like, oh, this is my tribe.”

            Good’s spending more time behind the camera these days as well. She directed episode two of Season two of Harlem, “If You Can’t Say Anything Nice?” as well as an upcoming romantic comedy for Tyler Perry Studios which she’ll star in, too, alongside Terrence J, DeRay, and Paige Hurd. Directing speaks to Good’s desire to “actually get to the work,” as she puts it, and not have to deal with everything else that comes with performing on screen.           

            “There’s no makeup, there’s no hair, I come to work just like this, in some tennis shoes, and I just create, and I try to bring something out of other people that other people haven’t seen.

            “I like for it not to be about me, she adds. “I like really serving other people.”

            To that end, Good’s not fixated on the accolades she’ll acquire in this next phase of her career. I ask her outright if she has her heart set on a Golden Globe or Oscar for instance, and she answers, “I have my heart set on an ESSENCE Award.”

            “That’s what I want. Because it’s not about how good of an actress I am, it’s about how good of a person I am. It’s not about what I’ve accomplished in my career or what I will accomplish, it’s about what I’ve accomplished as a human being and how I use my career to accomplish something that’s bigger than myself. That matters more to me.”

            Listening to Good, I wonder, how many people know this side of her? Or better, how many people have bothered to get to know this side of her?

            There was a time, particularly early on in Good’s former marriage, when that figure was slim, especially within the Christian community, which should’ve been her safe space. “People were like, ‘Well, he must have saved her; ‘Why did she dress like that?’ Or ‘She can’t be a real Christian,’ Good recalls.

            “That was rough for me. For years, I was scared to post Halloween pictures. I would do it anyway because I’m never going to not do what I want to do. If I feel like it’s good between me and God then I’m going to do it regardless, but it was a lot of trauma because I was brave enough to do it anyway.”

            That action, paired with those words, nearly makes it impossible not to understand who Good is at her core. And from her perspective, that’s starting to shine through to the masses.

            “I think people are starting to get who I am,” she says. “I think for a long time they didn’t. And I had to get to a place where I stopped caring in order for me to walk into the place where people now are like, ‘No, I actually get her.’”

Styled by Michy Foster
Hair by Jasmine Ashley using Jasmine Ashley Collection
Makeup by Jorge Monroy using Knesko
Nails by Brooklynn Rhayne
Set Designers: Alame Awoyemi and Arthur Ndoumbe
Photography Assistant: Byron Nickleberry
Digitech: Oscar Torres
Styling Assistant: Tarese Douglas
Production Coordinators: Alaura Wong and Gabriel Bruce
Shot at Solar Studios
Photography Direction by Michael Quinn
Production by The Morrison Group