Source: Michael Tran / Getty
After being estranged for 13 years, Mo’Nique and Lee Daniels have made amends. During her stand-up performance at the “Mo’Nique and Friends: April Fools Day with The Queen of Comedy” event at the St. George Theatre on Staten Island, Daniels issued her a public apology.
“I’m so sorry for hurting you in any way that I did,” he told Mo’Nique with his arms around her. “She was my best friend! My best friend! Ya’ll think Precious was just…That was God working through both of us.”
In response, the Baltimore native replied with a heartfelt, “I love you.”
The two fell out after Mo’Nique began to be vocal about not getting the pay raise she expected after winning an Oscar in 2010 for her role as Mary Lee Johnston in Precious. She said Daniels later told her she had been blackballed from Hollywood.
“I got a phone call from Lee Daniels maybe six or seven months ago,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “And he said to me, ‘Mo’Nique, you’ve been blackballed.’ And I said, ‘I’ve been blackballed? Why have I been blackballed?’ And he said, ‘Because you didn’t play the game.’ And I said, ‘Well, what game is that?’ And he gave me no response. The next thing he said to me was, ‘Your husband is outbidding you’. But he never asked me what [salary] we were asking for. You know, my husband and I had to change things so we wouldn’t have to depend on [others]. So we do it independently.”
She also claimed that he offered her a slew of roles and then reneged.
“I was offered the role in The Butler that Oprah Winfrey played. I was also approached by Empire to be on Empire. And I was also offered the role as Richard Pryor‘s grandmother in [Daniels’ upcoming Pryor biopic]. Each of those things that he offered me was taken off the table. They all just went away.”
Now that they have made amends, Daniels has now offered Mo’Nique a role in Demon House, a horror film that tells the story of Latoya Ammons and her family, Deadline reported. The role originally went to Octavia Spencer but she had to back out of it due to scheduling conflicts with another show she is filming, Truth Be Told.
