Lee Daniels On Getting Vomit On Your Tux At Cannes

The director and provocateur on the afterlife of Empire, the limits of woke culture— and why Precious was really a comedy.

- Andrew Goldman

ONE AFTERNOON IN MAY, inside his modern Beverly Hills home, Lee Daniels digs his toes into a sitting room’s biscuit-colored flokati, visibly restless as he toggles between two iPhones while waiting for Fox to announce the fate of Star, his Empire spinoff. He’s in jeans and a black hoodie embossed with the word blackman in black letters. “ ‘Nothing so far,’ ” Daniels says, reading from his phone. “ ‘No love yet for Star.’ ” By day’s end, Star would be canceled. The following week, Fox announced that the upcoming sixth season of Empire would be its last and that, in light of his assault scandal, Jussie Smollett would not be returning as Jamal Lyon, the embattled gay son of the Berry Gordy–like Lucious Lyon. That the network declared his shows dead and dying could easily be seen as a career- torpedoing setback, but Daniels, a self- described “hustler,” views cancellation as just an invitation to test his ingenuity and nerve. “I’m NOT letting them STOP the CULTURE. SORRY!” he wrote on Instagram a week later (handle: @ theoriginalbigdaddy), when announcing his ultimately fruitless effort to locate a new home for Star.