It is Nia Long’s moment—again. The actor is in Los Angeles a month before the premiere of “Michael,” the biopic about the King of Pop, and she arrives wearing an oversized blazer, wide-leg jeans, and a Miu Miu baseball cap pulled low. In the film, Long plays Katherine Jackson, the matriarch of the Jackson family. The role requires a specific kind of stillness. On screen, she watches her sons rehearse, and the camera holds on her face for just a few beats. She says almost nothing. Yet, juxtaposed to the blustering portrayal of Joe Jackson by Colman Domingo and the uncanny performance of Jaafar Jackson as Michael, Long’s silence becomes weightier. Restraint is the most visible thing in any scene she occupies.
She speaks in person with a dry sense of humor and deep emotional intelligence. She notices everything. The word she reaches for when she talks about the experience is grace. “There have been moments in my life where I’ve been required to be more graceful than I’ve ever had to be in the past,” she says. “And that requires a sense of really being able to dig deep into some sort of self-examination. Like, what do I stand for? What’s important to me, ultimately, regardless of Hollywood, the noise?” She pauses. “What I think I learned from her is that sometimes grace is really quiet.”
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Long has starred in several iconic Black films, and she has always been intentional about how she plays her characters. She creates a version of the person that feels, to her, like something true. “The only strategy I have in this game is my bank account. Let’s strategize how we’re going to make money and create generational wealth,” she jokes. “That is where I’m strategic.” She laughs and scratches her palm. “My hand just started itching the minute I said money. That’s a good thing. Maybe something’s happening.”
Now that her eldest son is in his 20s and her youngest, 14, is old enough to stay home by himself, Long feels ready to expand in all directions. She wants to continue to produce more films and craft new stories. She recently wrapped shooting a romantic dramedy titled “Don’t Ever Wonder” in New York. The film features a reunion with Larenz Tate and an ensemble including Blair Underwood, Susan Kelechi Watson, and Algee Smith. It is about second acts. “This is not a continuation of ‘Love Jones,'” she emphasizes. “This is a continuation of love, and of what happens once you’ve had your kids, they’re off to college, and you’re empty nesters.”
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Long is writing a memoir that takes her back to Iowa City, where she spent six years of her childhood while her mother attended university. She was born in Brooklyn in a Trinidadian household where everyone on the block was Black. Living in the Midwest during her formative years, she encountered few other Black girls, which disoriented her relationship to race. “In writing this memoir, I realized the impact that experience had on my own view of beauty,” she says. “And my own self-acceptance of being a pretty brown-skinned little girl growing up in Iowa.” She thought she was beautiful because her mother said it and her family said it, but the world told her something different. “So to now be a face for Estée Lauder, it’s kind of ironic, because I didn’t feel beautiful until Black Hollywood said I was beautiful.”
Nineties Fine, after all, did not emerge from a vacuum. It was a corrective, Black Hollywood’s answer to a century of the larger industry rendering Black women invisible or making them visible in ways wholly out of their control. Long’s most iconic characters reflected a new idea of beauty, expansive in some ways and still restrictive in others. Now, some 30 years on, she embodies a new facet of being a Black woman in Hollywood. The industry often praises Black women for defying the aging process, a compliment that sometimes erases the pressure of aging on a public stage. “I’m 55. I got hormonal stuff going,” she says. “Your body shifts, changes. It’s a whole new body.” She is not wistful about this. She ate the truffle parmesan fries and does not appear conflicted about it.
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Beauty was never her primary currency. It had to be something else, other inheritances: her father’s curiosity, her mother’s fierce self-possession. Tattooed and free-spirited, her mother wore leg warmers in the middle of summer because they matched her outfit, and she did not care what anyone thought. Embarrassed, Long would beg her mother to take them off. Her mother never did. As an adult, Long sees the power and freedom in that. “Being able to do what you want to do when you want to do it, because it serves your spirit, not what everyone else thinks you need to be or should be,” she says. “You don’t have to have anyone else’s permission to do what you love. And it doesn’t have to be on the big stage. It could be in your kitchen.”
