The realization of what they had done between “action” and “cut” hit both actresses at Sundance, where, as Sidibe sweetly confesses, the sensation surrounding the film made her “so famous” on the ski town’s Main Street. Mo’Nique was floored by the experience of watching Precious alongside the festival audience of Tinseltown elite. “None of those people looked like us,” Mo’Nique recalls, addressing the issues of race, class and gender that adhere to the film. “And it was mind-blowing when it was over, to have white men in their 60s coming up to us, crying. It killed the myth. It killed the myth that a white man couldn’t possibly enjoy two big black women onscreen.”
“It was the gratification of knowing that on set we were right,” adds Sidibe, who says she has been called for meetings all over Hollywood and has lined up her next job in Yelling to the Sky, with Don Cheadle. “That we were doing something special and important. That it’s not just a black movie.”
