Bossip Video
1 of 3

Image via Digital Focus/Splash News

Mary J. Blige Says She Feels “Suckered” By Kendu Isaacs

Many of us watched what we thought was Mary J. Blige exorcising her demons during her visceral BET Awards performance, but the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul is still hurting. Badly.

She recently sat down with Variety to promote her new Netflix movie “Mudbound” and revealed that her toxic marriage to Kendu Isaacs definitely helped her bring her character, Florence, to life on-screen:

It was a rough time for Blige in her personal life. Her marriage to her husband was crumbling. “I used a lot of my own heaviness from my own misery that I was living in that horrible marriage,” says the performer, who worked with an acting coach. “I was just dying in it. I knew something was wrong. I just couldn’t prove it. I just had all the heaviness of not feeling right, not feeling good. I gave it to Florence.”

She felt most conflicted about an aspect of her character that wouldn’t have been a hitch for most actresses. “The hardest part was intimacy,” she says about the scenes where she lies in bed and slow dances with her on-screen husband, Hap (Morgan). “I was married. I never touched another man other than my husband. I was petrified: ‘Oh God. I don’t want to do it.’” Rees took her aside and told her that she had to work on that. “You know what, Mary?” she told herself. “This is the job. This is acting. You’ve got to commit.” She delivered so convincingly, she made her director cry.

Mary also gave an open and honest account of how she is feeling these days in the wake of being embarrassed so publicly:

“I’m doing OK,” she says with a sigh. “I’m living. I’m not happy about a lot of things. I thought someone loved me, right? Turns out, he was a con artist and he didn’t, and now he’s coming after me for all my money. When you come out of something like that, you realize you were never the one. There was someone else that was his queen. I got played. I got suckered. I have to keep smiling and keep my spirits up because this is designed to kill me.”

Designed. To. Kill. Me.

If Kendu Isaacs has any soul whatsoever those words will ring in his head for the rest of his life.

Flip the page to watch a preview of Mary’s new flick “Mudbound”.

Continue Slideshow

Comments

Bossip Comment Policy
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.