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Newcomer brings Precious to life in Lee Daniels' tough pic
By Andrea Miller | Monday, September 14, 2009 | TIFF | () Comments | Add a Comment

Precious 

Bubbly, outspoken, confident and funny Gabourey "Gabby" Sidibe wants you to know that she is not the character she so fearlessly portrays in Precious: Based on the novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire, no matter how hard it is to separate the actress from the troubled young girl she brings to life.

“People think I’m Precious, which is so annoying,” she said while in Toronto to talk about the film, screening as part of TIFF. “They want to hug me and like, save me from my life and I’m like, 'No, my parents love me.’”

In fact, it was her mother, a singer, who first introduced Sidibe to the powerful book after being approached to play the role of Precious’ hellish mother and, though she passed on it, had other ideas for her daughter.

“My mom told me I should audition for the role and I was like, ‘You think I can do anything, mom.’ She used to take me to Huggies commercials and stuff and I told her, I’m not an actress, boo,” she laughed. “Cut to four years later and I get a call from my friend Henry, who’s an assistant director, and he knew they were coming to cast. I didn’t really want to do it. I was in college, it was literally the first week back. But, kind of on autopilot, I went in and within an hour got a call-back.”

And given her startling performance, it’s a good thing Sidibe decided to audition for what would turn out to be her debut film role.

She's riveting as the titular overweight, poverty-stricken 16-year-old who has been twice impregnated by her father, fallen through the cracks at school despite a quick mind and is subjected to her mother’s hurtful words, hateful stares and strong backhand on a daily basis. But she isn't a pitiable character who gives up easily. Instead she somehow exudes hope and a quiet complexity beneath the surface, a quality that director Lee Daniels admits was hard to find.

Watch the trailer

And seeing almost 500 girls, many of whom had been abused and were themselves uneducated, he hadn't found anyone who exhibited the depth he thought the part demanded. And then he met Gabby.

"She is not the character and had to learn to become this woman. And that was challenging and rewarding because she's so much smarter than me," he said. "She's younger so that mind is quick. And she understood the material on a primal level. She understood what it's like to be of this woman's girth. The rest....I had to take the experiences I had as a child and sort of pass them onto her and blow them into her ear so that we could find the truth onscreen."



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