When Taraji P. Henson first appears onstage in the 2026 revival of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, she’s met with lengthy, rapturous applause. It delights her every time.
“It moves me to tears,” Henson says. “It’s just so overwhelming because this is not a movie theater. Broadway is a destination. It’s not, ‘Oh, I’m gonna go to the AMC in Sherman Oaks’ or, ‘I’m gonna meet my girls at the AMC in Beverly Hills.’ You have to come to New York. And people are coming—they’re flying, they’re traveling in buses, they’re caravanning to see little old me, this girl from southeast D.C. who just had a dream.”
At the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Henson is making her Broadway debut as Bertha Holly, a woman running a cozy Pittsburgh boardinghouse with her husband, Seth (Cedric the Entertainer), in 1911, during the Great Migration. There, lost souls like the mysterious Herald Loomis (Joshua Boone) seek refuge and reckon with their complicated pasts.
Henson describes Bertha as “the glue” of the operation: Though she doesn’t have any children, she’s a devoted maternal figure to her boarders, doing everything in her power to make them feel at home—whether that’s by making them soulful home-cooked meals or lending a nonjudgmental listening ear.
“Bertha is the moral compass and the North Star,” Henson says. “She talks about love and laughter during a very dark time. The Great Migration was full of hope, but a lot of people didn’t make it. It wasn’t easy coming up north. People were searching for lost family members, reconnecting with their spirituality and identity, and trying to find some sense of freedom. A lot was going on, but when you come to the Holly house, you’re gonna get fed. You’re gonna get loved on.”
The role arrived at just the right time. Debbie Allen, the play’s director, called Henson, “and I said yes right away.” She’d been approached about Broadway roles before—among them, Shug Avery in The Color Purple—but other projects had always stood in the way. “I was either on Empire or doing a movie,” she explains. “So this time, it was perfect. That’s why I think the play found me. In some way, spiritually, I feel like I was supposed to do it.”
In fact, Henson has adjusted rather quickly to the rhythms and the rigors of performing live. “If you’re emoting on the stage or you tell a joke, you know right away if the audience feels it. In film, you have to wait until they yell cut, so it’s a delayed reaction. And you also have no control. You can put fire in the can, baby, but then they can go into the editing room and chop and screw your performance. But when I’m on that stage? Ain’t no editor.”
Henson embraces the “adrenaline rush” of performing live, even if it comes with the occasional fumble. During a recent performance, she dropped a bag of flour mid-scene. “That’s the thing about theater, you have to keep it pushing,” she says. “I can’t come out of character. I gotta clean it up the way Bertha would. Every day is different, and you’re right there in the moment. You have to stay locked in, and you have to figure it out.”
Paul Tazewell’s period-specific costuming also helps to ground her in the world of the play. “He’s as elegant a person as those costumes,” Henson says. “One of my dresses has over 20 snaps on it. There were no zippers during that time, so there are no shortcuts. We’re all in corsets. I’m strapped in, which I like because it helps with the movement. I have horrible posture, so the first thing that the corset does is make me stand erect. It was amazing working with Paul—what an amazing eye for detail.”
Henson first encountered August Wilson, who died in 2005, while she was a student at Howard University. She fondly remembers when the legendary playwright came to speak to her Acting 101 class. “We were young, budding actors at ‘The Mecca,’” she says. “Being around that kind of greatness, that I could just reach out and touch, just made me believe that I could really make my dreams come true.”
Years later, in 2013, she entered Wilson’s world professionally, playing Molly Cunningham, one of the guests at the boardinghouse, in a radio production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone for WNYC. The show, co-starring Keith David and S. Epatha Merkerson as Seth and Bertha, was directed by Allen’s sister, Phylicia Rashad. The recording was part of an effort to record all 10 plays in Wilson’s American Century Cycle, which also includes Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Piano Lesson, and Fences.
If asked, Henson says she would Gladlys reprise her role of Bertha for a film. “I think it’s incredible that Denzel and his production companies are putting these plays in film form,” she says, referring to the suite of Wilson adaptations that Denzel Washington has brought to the silver screen. “For you to fully understand August Wilson and what he did for us culturally, by taking this incredible century-cycle photograph of the Black experience, you need to see it. I can’t wait until they’re all in the cinema canon.”
Offstage, Henson prefers to leave behind the “boot camp” energy of her demanding theater schedule. “You really have to rest and take care of yourself,” she says. “Performing eight shows a week, especially those emotional scenes, is exhausting. So when I have time, I’m at home with my dogs.” She likes to cook and recently tried the viral one-pot chicken soup recipe that’s been floating around online. Her specialty, though, is collard greens. “If I’m traveling or if I’m working on location, the first thing I do when I get settled is make me a pot of greens.”
Her work outside of acting is also continuing apace. Henson’s Moscato brand, Seven Daughters, is an official alcohol partner of the Broadway production, and she’s tweaking the offerings of her haircare line, TPH by Taraji, which she has owned outright for a year. “You can still purchase the hit products that everybody loves, but I’m reformulating some things. It’s all mine now, so I really get to do what I want with it. I’m so excited.”
Her next film, Why Did I Get Married Again?, in which she stars alongside Jill Scott, Sharon Leal, and Tasha Smith, comes out later this year. “I had fun on that ’cause we filmed it in Lake Como. It was very sexy, chile. I love my character, honey. She even wears Schiaparelli.” Another, 'Tis So Sweet—Smith’s feature-length directorial debut—sees Henson play the Chicago bakery owner Lenore Lindsey.
Henson finds that all of these projects feed and buttress one another. “To headline a Broadway play, the audience has to trust you,” she says. “It’s just like when you buy a movie ticket. These people like the work that I do because I make them feel something. They show up to my movies, they show up to watch my television shows that stream, and now they’re showing up to see me on the stage.”
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is currently in previews at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. It opens on April 25.