Jennifer Hudson on being handpicked by Aretha Franklin to play her

Respect star Jennifer Hudson talks about portraying Aretha Franklin, and the cast weighs in on the importance of having women lead the creative direction of the film.

Video Transcript

- R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T, take care, TCB, oh

KEVIN POLOWY: Here, you are portraying the queen herself, Aretha Franklin. I mean, just how daunting or nerve-wracking was just the idea of portraying her from the get go?

JENNIFER HUDSON: Very daunting. And then add on top of her saying, I want you to play me. Oh, my God! What am I supposed to do? And then thinking about just how dear she is to all of us, including myself, I'm a fan first, so I understand the task. I understand the figure and it's like, Oh, my God! Where do I start?

KEVIN POLOWY: What did you find were the tougher or toughest aspect of portraying her?

JENNIFER HUDSON: One of-- OK, how am I supposed to sit in this to like being Jennifer Hudson to make it different from all my tributes to her.

As a fan and as a musician, I know everything. I know all your material. I've been a fan but now it requires something completely different now that I'm looking at it as an actor to portray her.

But the biggest challenge in that was being able to conform to how women existed during that time. So to figure out how to tell the story as an actor, just the expression.

That was very challenging because I take up space in a room and I'm very expressive and vocal. So now wait a minute right, I am not Jennifer right now, I'm Aretha in the 60s. Where women didn't have a voice as much as we do today. So how do I channel that until the story.

KEVIN POLOWY: Of course, we've got to talk about the woman who took on the gargantuan task of playing the queen herself. Jennifer Hudson, just now in this film, what was it like from your vantage point to watch her transform into this icon before your eyes especially those first couple of days working with her on set?

MARLON WAYANS: I swear, I was like, What are you doing today? I'm going to work to watch Jennifer Hudson went to Oscars. I've never seen a performance like this up close man two never one horse. If I sing Respect two times in a week, I can't talk for the rest of the month.

She sang it hundreds of times in a day and not once did she ever need, Oh my, I can't go to work. I would have laryngitis, meningitis, arthritis, I would add all that in my throat if I sang like she sang.

It felt like she was in church every day and she was an inspiration to all of us on that set. When she comes in with her A game, we all love to bring out A game.

KEVIN POLOWY: There's work follow you home in this case, though. Are you singing Aretha Franklin when you leave set her music?

MARLON WAYANS: Yes, literally. What you want, baby, I got it. Oh. Do you had a sizzle? Oh. Every night, they sing a different song that's a song in your head until the song we sang came.

KEVIN POLOWY: Aretha faced such things in spite of all the success. Clearly, she faced such trauma and strife in her life and the film really confronts especially how the men around her like her father, her first husband and manager, trying to control her.

What do you think this story says about that dynamic of gender and power in entertainment in life and also Aretha's ability to liberate herself from that kind of sexism that control that she Faced

LIESL TOMMY: I wish I could say that it was a product of a time period. But we look at what Britney Spears is going through right now, we know that that's not a product of the time period. It's part of the burden that women bear when living under patriarchy where people think that their lives are not their own.

And one of the things when I pitched the film is that I know I said this movie should be about a woman who has the greatest voice in the world trying to find her own voice. Because that is what I thought the fascinating part of her 20s was about.

Seeing her go through all of the struggles and some of that trauma is how we can really understand what an incredible person is when she made it to the other side. And we get the triumph to really glory in her success.

I feel like you had to understand what she went through to get there. People really always want to see black women just be sassy and strong and have the quick come back.

And I just felt like it's time for us to be able to show black women's real complex lives, where they are unsure, where they are shy, all of those things are real not just you know sassy and powerful.

MARLON WAYANS: I think is basically power is something we all give and gift to people. Empowerment is when you take your own power and give it to yourself.

When you realize it's your power, so you take that and do something with it. I mean Aretha did that when she owned it that's when she became the queen, and she's got to own it.

MARK MARON: I think what it speaks to is that given the room to fully express oneself that there are very few things you can overcome or we shine a light on or at least find a voice for that would ease the pain and not you enable you to disable your propensity to continue to destroy yourself.

Either with other people or with alcohol or whatever. And you see that in different layers, certainly in the music you relating to what freeing yourself from that relationship with her father and with her abusive husband.

And then later, with Jesus music freeing her from drugs and being spiritually lost, it was all like her voice speaking through different impulses and coming from different places that you enabled her to just exist as the artist she was.

AUDRA MCDONALD: Choosing who to direct this film and who to write screenplay was very important. You have a black woman and Liesl Tommy directing it.

Jennifer Hudson is not only the star, she's one of the executive producers. And Tracey Scott Wilson, the black woman is the writer. So it was very important for them to not only show the trajectory of the specific moment in her life because if you were to do a real like a film about Aretha's entire life, it would be 19 hours long.

Because you know her legacy and her career just went on for forever, thank God.

But I know it was very important to Liesl and to Tracey in particular, to show women in her life that helped her to find her own voice and to find her own power, to then advocate for herself and step into her power.

Who better than black women to tell the story of a Black woman stepping into her own power.