Reconciled. Nearly seven years after Mo’Nique — full name Monique Angela Hicks — alleged that her Precious director, Lee Daniels, had “blackballed” her from the film industry, the pair are on much better terms.
“[It took me] a long time to realize [this but] I am so sorry for hurting you in any way that I did,” Daniels, 62, told the comedian, 54, at her “Mo’Nique and Friends: April Fools Day with The Queen of Comedy” event on Friday, April 1, per Twitter footage. “Y’all, she was my best friend — my best friend. Y’all think that Precious was just … That was God working through both of us.”
“And we’re gonna f–king do it again,” he continued before the pair embraced. “I love you. I love you.”
The Grammy nominee brought out Daniels as a special guest during her Staten Island, New York, comedy show.
“NO CAPTION NEEDED. I LOVE US 4REAL❤️,” Mo’Nique gushed via Instagram on Friday, sharing a snap of the pair from the show.
Mo’Nique previously starred in 2009’s Precious — directed and produced by Daniels — as the titular character’s mother. The role nnabbed her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress that year. However, her win was the subject of controversy after Daniels allegedly criticized her for refusing to campaign for it.
“First, I would like to thank the Academy for showing that it can be about the performance and not the politics,” Mo’Nique noted in her acceptance speech, seemingly shading the Butler director.
The Maryland native later alleged that those actions contributed to her getting “blackballed” by the industry on Daniels’ behalf.
“How did the Oscar change my life? What it did was that it gave me a new reality,” Mo’Nique told The Hollywood Reporter in February 2015. “And it let me know that an award wasn’t going to change my life — that I had to be in control of changing my life.”
She continued: “I thought, once you won the award, that’s the top prize — and so you’re supposed to be treated as if you got the top prize. [But] I got a phone call from Lee Daniels maybe six or seven months ago. And he said to me, ‘Mo’Nique, you’ve been blackballed.’ And I said, ‘I’ve been blackballed? Why have I been blackballed?’ And he said, ‘Because you didn’t play the game.’ And I said, ‘Well, what game is that?’ And he gave me no response.”
Daniels, for his part, continued to assert his innocence in the matter through the years, noting that he always called the Parkers alum a friend.
“It breaks my heart that she feels that we blackballed her. No one blackballed her. Mo’Nique blackballed her,” the Paperboy filmmaker told TMZ in July 2018.
