Initially when Fantasia Barrino was presented with the opportunity to reprise her role as “Celie” in “The Color Purple,” she turned down the gig.
A huge reason why Barrino declined is because of the very real similarities between Celie’s life and Barrino’s, as a domestic violence survivor who struggled with depression.
Just three years after her big break in “The Color Purple” on Broadway in 2007, she almost succumbed to her depression.
“I didn’t have any fight in me,” she said in an episode of VH1’s Behind the Music that same year. “I didn’t care about anything. I just wanted out. At that moment I wanted out.”
With Barrino’s swift rise to fame after winning American Idol and releasing her platinum-selling album “Free Yourself” in 2004, she had no time to prepare for the whims of Hollywood. And she only catapulted to a higher level of stardom once she made it on Broadway.
“I was this Southern girl, green and gullible and eager to please,” she told Billboard in 2016.
Certain personal choices she made early on in her career sent her down a dark path. In 2010, the details of the very public falling out between her former boyfriend and his wife casted a negative light on Barrino, and around the same time, she was struggling with her financial responsibilities.
But she was able to build herself back up by strengthening her faith and committing to herself, she told Billboard. More than a decade later, Barrino is now happily married and a proud mom of three children.
Yet, being presented with the opportunity of portraying Celie again brought up heavy emotions that Barrino had buried. The thought of reliving Celie’s story after portraying her for eight shows a week back in 2007 was too much for her.
“My life was in shambles,” Barrino told Variety in November. “I carried her every day, all day, and I didn’t like that feeling,” she said in reference to playing Celie’s character on Broadway.
It took the director of the 2023 version of the musical, Blitz Bazawule, flying out to her North Carolina home and describing the vision of the film, to convince Barrino to say yes, according to Variety. Now, she looks at the role as a way to reclaim her, and Celie’s, power and finally let go of the burdens of her past.
“I realized Celie was not ugly,” she told Variety. “Celie was not crazy. Celie was not illiterate. Nothing about her was dumb. She was the piece to the whole puzzle that kept everybody together.”
“I’m grateful that I did not allow those voices in my head to hold me back from stepping into this woman’s shoes,” she said. “It was important that I did.”
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