Gabrielle Union's Five Favorite Films (original) (raw)
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After delighting us for decades in films like Bring it On, Bad Boys II, and Think Like a Man, Gabrielle Union steps into the producer chair once again this year and finds herself lavished with praise in her most critically acclaimed performance to date. Union’s new film The Inspection, a debut effort by writer-director Elegance Bratton, is an incredible standout in a full and varied filmography that already has Oscar pundits buzzing. Bratton’s story of a young army recruit who leaves for boot camp as a way to escape a life on the street after his mother disowns him due to his sexuality is based on his own experiences. Ellis, played by Jeremy Pope, embodies the director in the semi-autobiographical role, and Union plays his dominating and, at times, cruel mother figure. During the course of the film, we follow Ellis’ journey from homeless recruit to Marine. With literally nowhere to go, Ellis spends most of the feature battling the ever-present danger of his situation in boot camp at the height of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
In a brutally adversarial role that recalls other complex and traumatic parent-child dynamics we have seen on screen, Union elevates the film with minimal screen time. Critics and festival audiences seem to agree, with a 86% Certified Fresh rating on the Tomatometer and stellar reviews, particularly for the work of Pope and Union. Justin Chang from the LA Times called Union’s turn, “[a] revelatory performance which distills half a lifetime’s worth of bitter disappointment into a few extraordinarily chilling scenes.”
As both a producer and star, Union struggled with COVID restrictions and tight timelines but still delivered the powerful narrative flawlessly. Union has always had a passion for storytelling, which is reflected in her eclectic taste in film. Here are some of her all-time favorite movies with one honorable mention.
(Photo by ©A24)
Jacqueline Coley for Rotten Tomatoes: Talk about your job both in front of and behind the camera as a star and producer.
Gabrielle Union: My first job as a producer was sliding into Jeremy’s DMs. After we sent him the script and they were like, “It seems like he’s interested,” I was like, “Well, let me do what I do.” And I slid into his DMs as a good producer does, and I said, “Yo, if you are truly serious about this, if you’re in, I’m in, and let’s make some magic together.”
Honestly, our hardest part happened after, during, and after. But yeah, we got all of our first choices, which, that’s never happened to me in my entire career. You make your list of everyone you want, and then you’re like, “Oh, okay, these first eight people pass.” And then now you’re like, “Well, so and so, maybe.” We got every top person that we wanted for this movie, which is wild.
I think some of the harder parts were Elegance lost his mom so quickly after we got the green light. And the grief of losing her was palpable, so as a human being, you want to be there for this boy who just wants his mother, you know what I mean? And wants his mother’s love and affection and validation, and that boy being Elegance, and then having to figure out how to be respectful and still get this movie done and remain true to the story. So that was more of a challenge.
And then we had major COVID battles once we started. So it just became a battle of schedules because we got almost all the way through, and it is Jackson, Mississippi, and the COVID rates. You’re working in a state that is the poorest in the union, and we’re not adhering to any precautions. No one else outside of our production was really adhering to that. There’s a whole pandemic happening. So that became our biggest challenge, and we had to shut down for months. And then trying to get everyone back together to finish was a big challenge.
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RT: This is a challenging performance for anyone, but as a mother, especially one who lives her life in such stark contrast to your character on screen, how hard was it to balance that with your reality at home?
Union: It’s just dark. It’s incredibly, incredibly dark because it’s what we deal with as a family. I wish the more recent public spectacle of it all wasn’t a public spectacle. Still, now people know what the hell we’ve been dealing with and why it was so important for me to have channeled the darkest recesses of my mind and soul to portray this kind of mother accurately and fully and not look for the bright side. Because there are not a lot of bright sides. You try to remain fair to your characters and not judge them, but the reality is there’s a depth of darkness that I’ve never had to mine before. I never was interested in mining. I didn’t think anyone was interested in seeing me mine that, because I didn’t know what was going to happen. Not to say I made fun of actors who were like, “I just had a hard time shaking it,” but I said, “Well, when they yell ‘cut,’ you shake it, right?” And then it was me, and they yelled, “cut,” and for weeks and months, I’m not okay. Not okay at all. And all I knew was I was like, “Please find me a comedy!”
In 2022, I only want to do comedy after that, because it just took me to a place I wasn’t ever interested in returning, and certainly not anytime soon. And it was the draw to these kinds of movies, thinking it’s going to lead to the kind of reaction we got — meaning critical reaction. Still, you want a human reaction, a regular people audience reaction, and you hope people see that perhaps they are the villain in someone’s story and take stock of that. But yeah, it just was very, very f–king dark.
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RT: Your co-star Jeremy Pope is incredible, especially in one of the most pivotal scenes in the film. How did you approach that day at the table, because it’s late in the story, and it is so crucial to how the film lands. It is all there, and if it doesn’t hit? That’s the film. Walk us through your work that day.
Union: Well, that day, we shot all day. We had a very limited amount of time, so we shot the graduation, the reception to the graduation, and the hallway scene all in one day. And we were racing against the light, so we didn’t have the luxury of time, so pretty much everything you saw was one or two takes. It was Jeremy and me literally staying. If we weren’t holding hands or being kind of snuggled up together physically, we wouldn’t have been able to deliver in the way we needed to. Because there’s all of us as human beings, there’s Jeremy and Gab, and then there’s Elegance and Chester. And then we all had to have similar experiences. And obviously, for Elegance, that particular part was true — wasn’t a lot of embellishment in that particular scene. And we all have to turn it all off to get it right quickly because we’re losing light, and we still have to shoot the hallway scene.
And that was a big “here’s what’s happening at our table” moment, and then there’s the whole crowd’s response to it. The rest of the Marines and background, they’re all there. So it was a challenge to get it and get it right quickly. And then to just stay in it all day because we just didn’t have the time to do much else.
In other productions, you hear people say, “You shoot that, and that would be your whole day.” We just didn’t have that luxury. So we literally held onto each other. When you see us on the press tour, and we’re literally still holding onto each other, we’re holding onto each other for a thousand different personal Gabrielle and Jeremy reasons, but where these characters take us, still to this day, and whether it’s being asked about or not. Because it’s personal. What it took to get us there is so personal, and it’s so dark. It’s the darkest pieces of our soul and some of our darkest experiences in life.
But we just had to get it right, stay in it, and not get out of it. Stay in it, stay in it, stay in it. Because we didn’t have rehearsal — you got to just be. And I don’t know what you call it; I don’t want to take away anything from our performance, but there was something bigger at play that used us, that came out in that moment that I had not practiced at home in the mirror, but whatever in my soul knew what needed to come out in that moment. So when I watched, it f–ked me up, to be honest. Because it’s like, “That lives inside of me somewhere, and I got to figure that out.”
The Inspection is playing in select theaters now.
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