Tracee Ellis Ross Puts Her ‘Girlfriends’ Character on Blast: ‘Really Mean’

The actress portrayed Joan Clayton in the hit 2000s TV series.

While reflecting on the legacy of Girlfriends, Tracee Ellis Ross came down on the behavior of her character, Joan Clayton, and her "messy" friendship with Antoinette "Toni" Childs-Garrett (portrayed by co-star Jill Marie Jones).

When NPR asked the Mixed-ish producer how she felt about Joan and Toni's legacy as "the prototypical messy best friends," she explained that their dynamic is not something she ever quite understood.

"Joan and Toni—I just—sometimes they were, like, really mean to each other," she said. "Like, I just really didn't understand that. It was something that, actually, Jill [Marie Jones], Golden [Brooks], Persia [White] and I—we constantly were like, who are these friends? Like, who does this to each other? Like, I've never heard of this. You know, it was something back then that we pushed up against at times. Like, that's really mean."

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Over the course of the UPN comedy series' six-season run, viewers watched as the childhood friends clashed several times, but the two always found their way back to one another.

"It's such a funny thing to look back and see," Ross said of the on-screen friends' dynamic. "But there's times towards the later seasons where, like, Toni comes at Joan, you know, and does, like, something and I'm like, oh, like, oh, my god, 'cause she had a heavy hand, as Grandma used to say."

Ross, now 50, also drew a poignant connection to a character she played more recently: Dr. Rainbow "Bow" Johnson, in the comedy TV series Black-ish. She described portraying the Johnson matriarch as feeling "like the grown-up version of Joan Carol Clayton, the woman who actually got the partner and had the kids."

"Joan was a lot more frightened. She had a lot more anxiety, a lot less faith," she added. "And Bow Johnson is - you know, she is a lot closer to me in a sense of trust around the love she has and what she has to offer."

"It's sort of like Bow got all the things Joan wanted," she concluded.

Fans looking to rewatch Girlfriends can find it on Netflix, while Black-ish can be streamed exclusively via Disney+ or Hulu.

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