Laugh Lessons

After a tough childhood and 20 years in the business, two saucy minutes with a grapefruit made Tiffany Haddish a superstar. Now the Girls Trip star is teaming with Kevin Hart in Night School, a rowdy comedy with deeper resonances. Total Film meets a force of nature who has learned the value of hard work.

- Jamie Graham

Seated in a five-star London hotel and looking a million dollars in a floral dress and lilac boots, her gold hoop earrings almost as big as her beehive, Tiffany Haddish is reenacting the ‘grapefruiting’ scene from last year’s Girls Trip. Google it if you’re unacquainted, but not at work, for Haddish’s movie-stealing character Dina uses said fruit to show her friends how to make a man… Well, just watch it. One thing’s for sure: it makes Jason Biggs inserting his junk into a warm apple pie seem as risqué as Peppa Pig.

“I read it in the script,” grins Haddish, “and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m getting this job. I know how to do this. I’ve seen the video. I did this. That’s how I got my Corvette.’ When I was married, I got a Corvette. So I’m like, ‘Yeah, this is not a problem.’ When it came down to doing the scene, they had a person on set who was like, ‘OK, you don’t want to do this, you don’t want to do that.’ I was like, ‘You sit down, because I’ve got this.’ The first take, the crew… We had to stop because everybody fell over. Everyone was like, ‘You’re crazy!’ Jada [Pinkett Smith] spat out her cereal, and La [Queen Latifah] fell over. It took us eight takes to get it, because everybody kept laughing.”