'I Learned That I'm A Powerful Woman Because I Don't Have To Say Much To Be Heard .'

Mary J. Blige Sees Herself A New.

- Carl Swanson

  THE FIRST TIME Mary J. Blige saw herself onscreen in Mudbound, it made her cry. She’d become someone else, someone unrecognizable, yet—and she had to be told this at first—someone undeniably beautiful: Florence Jackson, a sharecropper’s wife in Jim Crow Mississippi who navigated the narrow path allowed for her life, seeing much but saying little. “The great surprise at Sundance was that people didn’t know it was her until the credits rolled,” says the film’s director, Dee Rees.

And now Blige is up for an Academy Award for the portrayal, so different from that other character she’s spent 25 years creating and, in a way, hiding inside: the bling-armored, blonde-wigged, Grammy-laden “Queen of Hip-Hop Soul.”

“I’m used to my nails now, and I’m addicted to lashes,” says Blige when we meet downstairs at her blandly luxurious Westwood high-rise—inside, all buttery tones, the polished tentacles of a Dale Chihuly chandelier floating above the lobby; outside, a fellow tenant’s Maserati SUV idling in the porte cochère. She hadn’t wanted to have me up to her apartment, so when I arrived, her real love–hoodie-clad assistant led me through the building’s refrigerated wine cellar to what the concierge referred to as the “card room” for our conversation. “I’m Mary J. Blige. I mean, like, this is what I do. I wear wigs, I wear bob wigs, and I had to completely strip down to my own natural hair texture, which I’ve always been afraid of. Dee stripped me down all the way to what I truly am, and people were complimenting me. People were saying how beautiful I was. I didn’t know I was that beautiful for real. You understand what I’m saying? I didn’t know that.”