It’s a clear, sunny January afternoon in Los Angeles when LaTanya Richardson Jackson logs on to our Zoom call. She’s wearing a pair of stylish tortoise frames by Elisa Johnson, the daughter of her best friend Cookie and husband Magic Johnson. Coincidentally enough, she mentions that she’ll soon be joining the Johnsons on a cruise around the Caribbean to celebrate Cookie’s birthday.

“It is the most freedom that you can ever possibly imagine,” she says about casually and luxuriously sailing on the high seas. “The dominant culture—well, White people—they’ve been hiding out here.”

Over the next 13 minutes, Jackson shares details about her attention deficit disorder diagnosis, lovingly scolds me for teasing my grandparents about their noisy house phone (“It’s called a landline,” she says emphatically), dishes on being able to read French as a child without any formal teaching and reveals that she saw Jesus Christ in her bedroom when she was 6 years old.

She’s fascinating, and I wouldn’t dare call her a liar because I believe every single word.

Richardson-Jackson always knew she had something special. And when Jesus appeared in her room, that was all the confirmation she needed.

“There were all these little instances that would occur that attached me to something that was either metaphysical or something that was more spiritual or something that was extraordinarily out of the ordinary,” she recalls poignantly.

The 76-year-old actress was born and raised in Atlanta, which she affectionately calls “the mecca of everything for African-Americans in this country in the South.” As a child, she had a unique name (“I thought LaTanya was exotic, the way my mother spelled it with that capital ‘T’”), an elephant’s memory and the richest, darkest skin tone in her family.

The term “colorism” hadn’t been coined yet, but it’s something that she understood and recognized throughout her upbringing.

“I didn’t quite get it as a construct. It was a feeling. It was just an emotion,” she explains. “When I was with my sister or my cousins, they had what we used to call ‘water hair’ because you could put water on their hair and brush it. They were a set of twins—Evelyn and Gwendolyn. And when I was with them, I noticed that people reacted to us differently.”

In one instance, as their mother was getting Jackson’s older sister, Deborah, ready for a grade school dance, a young LaTanya asked why her sister was always chosen for such things. Her mother delivered a searing declaration.

“My mom said, ‘Let me tell you something. They’re going to always choose her, but they really want you,’” she recalls. “‘They just don’t know how to do it. But trust me, they really want you.’ And I never forgot that.”

Such a reality didn’t hold Jackson back, though. Outside of an admitted fear of the dark and ghosts (“Where are these principalities?” she asks, recalling biblical reference), she has always been a rather fearless person. In fact, she didn’t have a full grasp of growing up in the time of segregation because she navigated the world with pure curiosity.

“I was inquisitive. I found the world a wonder and things and people, and I would get excited,” she states. “When people said the buses were segregated, I didn’t even know what that meant because they let me sit in the front since I was always talking to [the bus driver].”

By age 14, Jackson began attending a summer theater program at Spelman University, and at 17, she enrolled as a freshman at the prestigious all-girls HBCU.

“It completes me to be a part of the Spelman legacy for Black women. It puts me at the top of the thinking food chain,” she remarks. “I know that we are progressives, and I know that we believe in change because we had people like Marian Wright Edelman and [former Spelman President] Dr. [Audrey] Manley teaching us that it was our responsibility as Black women to change the world.”

It’s why she’s been so adamant about telling Black stories, particularly in her stage work. Jackson has starred in and directed Broadway productions from revered Black playwrights like August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, with her work in the latter two projects earning her two “Best Actress” Tony nominations and the former marking the first time a woman ever directed an August Wilson play on Broadway.

She also has quite the stacked filmography, consistently working on both big and small screens for the last 30 years. Most notably, she’s the sharp-tongued, judgmental Paulina Pritchett in the 2003 cult classic The Fighting Temptations. Even 20-plus years later, her standout line, “Beware of brief delight and lasting shame,” still resonates with fans.

“We were able to capture the essence of who we are and the fun of who we are at the same time,” she replies in between chuckles as I quote lines from the film. “We showcased so many stars: we had Beyoncé, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Steve Harvey. We didn’t have a lot of movies that captured all those stars like this.”

As we’re discussing her upcoming directing project, Teyana Taylor being the belle of awards season and how she would be the perfect casting for a film about the first Egyptian female pharaoh, Hatshepsut, and what it means to be “Black famous” compared with “mainstream” notoriety, I tell Jackson that I’m surprised she hasn’t been profiled more often. She’s a storied actress and a total spitfire with something important to say.

Without missing a beat, she replies, “You know that you can’t do anything until the White people tell you to do it. I find myself in extraordinary circumstances with extraordinary people. But if Oprah didn’t sanction it, then the White people don’t know what to do with it. So, they wait on it.”

It’s clear that Jackson wants not only more for Black actresses like herself, but also the best for Black actresses. However, the industry is the industry. She starts describing a “little chocolate girl” that just did a “fighter movie,” referring to Ryan Destiny, who garnered buzz during the 2024-2025 awards season for her performance as boxing champion Claressa Shields in the biopic The Fire Inside.

“Ryan has been that girl for a long time,” she says firmly. “I said, ‘so it took them to take the makeup off and put her in this [boxing biopic] for them to finally see her,’ because I’ve been looking at her for a long time saying, this little girl’s got it.”

As we delve deeper into her own industry experiences, Jackson recounts an anecdote about auditioning for the 2011 film The Help, which would eventually star Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Emma Stone as two maids and a journalist forging a friendship during the Civil Rights Movement.

Since her grandmother was a housekeeper, Jackson emulated her stern and confident nature at her audition for the role of Minny Jackson. The film’s director, Tate Taylor, had a different portrayal in mind.

“‘Oh no, you don’t have enough fear in you when you’re saying these lines because you know they could have been killed,’” she recalls him saying. “And I said [to myself], Watch this young White boy try to tell me [about this experience]. I decided in the room that this is a teaching moment. I’m not gonna get this job and f–k it.

“I was raised by a housekeeper,” she continues. “They knew these people, they knew exactly what could happen to them. But sometimes, you just took on [disciplining and rearing White children] because these are children and they might just listen to you. This movie cannot be about toilets. This movie has to be about the indomitable spirit that allowed Octavia[’s character] to put some s–t in that pie.”

She describesthe experience as “the bane of my career,” but it serves as an example of her principled nature and commitment to authenticity in Black experiences across film and beyond. It’s the very thing that her time at Spelman taught her: you build upon what you know, “not on somebody else’s idea of what you should know.”

Spelman also brought her Samuel L. Jackson. LaTanya is married to the star, often regarded as one of the finest actors of our time. They first met while she was at Spelman and he was at Morehouse College. The two dated from 1970 until their wedding in 1980.

“[We were] acting, doing drugs, working, seeing the world, seeing life, meeting everybody in New York,” she says when asked about the 10-year courtship. “We were engaged and involved in the art dance.”

The 80s brought a lot of change for the actress. By the end of the decade, she was a mother, her husband’s film career was on the rise, AIDS had taken the lives of her best friend and daughter’s godfather, and she’d completely stopped working.

“We had determined that it was our revolutionary responsibility to raise our daughter,” Jackson says. “I had a nanny off and on, but I didn’t have a full-time person taking care of our daughter. It was me.”

Speaking of her husband she says, “It was like, who’s on first? And he got on first. And of course, everybody in Hollywood, all the White people, they saw him. They, of course, did not see me.”

It isn’t quite a tone of regret; her words linger in the air as if she’d given life to a series of swallowed concessions. It’s a sacrificial sentiment that is echoed in a subsequent anecdote about a conversation she had with Denzel Washington’s wife, Pauletta, a fellow actress and dear friend.

“I said, ‘You know why we have to stay married?’ We have to ’cause, trust, we could have both been gone,” she asserts. “We have to stay married to them so that people can see the other side of the coin. That, first of all, they’re successful because we stand in the gap for them. To hold their press up against their back. To keep them moving forward. We’re going to do that, but this needs to be seen so that they see that it’s not a White woman doing it and it’s not a very fair-skinned woman either.”

It was also important for the couple’s daughter, Zoe, to see. She’s since began her own career in the industry and is now an Emmy-winning TV producer.

“She’s a bad—. She’s the boss and sometimes she thinks she’s the boss of us,” Jackson says with a hearty chuckle. “And because she’s an only child, she holds our feet to the fire about what we should and can and can’t. And we’re just like, ‘Girl…’”

Now, it’s Jackson who’s being seen, and she’s leaning into the moment in several ways. That includes by taking the director’s chair for the stage once again. This summer, she will direct Geffen Playhouse’s Angry, Raucous, and Shamelessly Gorgeous, from playwright Pearl Cleage. She’s also continuing to pour into the next generation through philanthropy as she and her husband have recently opened the LaTanya Richardson Jackson and Samuel L. Jackson Performing Arts Center at Spelman College.

“Philanthropy is a big word now, but you know, Black people have always been philanthropists. We’ve always had to take care of each other,” she says. “We give money to everybody because everybody has to understand that not only does it empower you, but it also empowers everyone else to feel supported.”

Her commitment to empowering the future is grounded in a deep awareness of the past. Jackson notes that the effects of the AIDS epidemic still have an impact on her—and has impacted the future of Black art.

“It just decimated a complete culture of Black artists, and I mean real artists. Now, I look at some of the [films and TV shows today] and I think about them and who they could be now that our environment has expanded,” she reflects. “I wish I had the advantages then that I got now because I could have knocked that through the wall. Because I see it—I see what needs to be done.”

And if I’ve learned anything about LaTanya Richardson Jackson from our time together, it’s that she’ll find a way to get it done.

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
PHOTOGRAPHED BY PEACE BUREAU
STYLED BY LATANYA RICHARDSON JACKSON
HAIR: GEORGE FULLER
MAKEUP: ADAM CHRISTOPHER
NAILS: SAYO IRIE
MAKEUP ASSISTANT: ROSETTA GARCIASTYLING ASSISTANTS:ELLE HIOE
SET DESIGN: YARA KAMALI
SET ASSISTANT: CIERA MCGREW & JEAN PAUL DANIELS
LIGHTING TECHNICIAN: NATE STURLEY
DIGITAL TECHNICIAN: FERNANDO MATAMOROS
PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANTS: FERNANDO MATAMOROS
PRODUCTION: PEACE BUREAU
PRODUCTION MANAGER: NIA JEAN-RAYMOND
PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS: CIERA MCGREW & JEAN PAUL DANIELS
POST PRODUCTION: SAMANTHA NANDEZ
LOCATION: DUST STUDIOS, LA
SPECIAL THANKS: ESSENCE, Visuals Director, Breanna Hall
ESSENCE, Art Director, Isaiah Stewart