Gabourey Sidibe

Early in Precious (2009), after a beating, a sixteen-year-old girl looks in a mirror and sees a thin blonde white girl looking back, and her voiceover carries on as if nothing had happened. That is Gabourey Sidibe's method in one shot. She plays Precious with her face nearly shut, head down, coat on in the school corridors, and lets Geoffrey S. Fletcher's voiceover say everything the face refuses to. It could have been a cheat. It is not, because she allows the two to disagree, and the gap between them is where the character lives. We were more shaken by that mirror than by anything Mo'Nique's Mary does with her hands, which is a strange thing to be able to say about someone's first film.

It was a first film in every sense. Sidibe had no training and no professional experience when she auditioned; she was a psychology student in New York, and Lee Daniels cast her as the lead anyway. What she brought was stillness. The film around her does not always deserve it. Daniels does not do restraint, the daydream sequences keep tripping over the story, and the second half settles into the shape of the inspirational-teacher film. Sidibe and Mo'Nique are not doing anything that old. They play a mother and daughter who have never once been kind to each other, and we believed every minute.

Then came television, and a great deal of it. The Big C (2010–2013) was the first series; American Horror Story took her on from 2013, first as Queenie in Coven, and Ryan Murphy has kept bringing her back; Empire (2015–2020) made her a series regular as Becky Williams and put her back with Daniels. There has been a thriller, Antebellum (2020), a memoir in 2017 and a short she directed the same year, The Tale of Four. We have not reviewed the television, and we will not pretend to judge it here, but the shape is plain enough: ensembles, long runs, parts that ask for warmth and quickness rather than for the near-silence of Precious.

That may be the point. There was talk when Precious came out that a role so intense would trap her, and the steady work since is one answer to it. She has said, "I'm really, really interested in the job of acting. I can really care less about being famous," and the list of credits reads like someone who meant it. What we have not seen is another director asking her for the thing Daniels found: a face that gives away nothing while a voice gives away everything. Somebody should ask. The mirror scene suggests there is a good deal more where it came from.