The nonprofit work she does, advocating for mental health within the Black community in particular, isn’t necessarily lucrative, but it has become a calling. “I don’t think we’re here to just benefit ourselves,” she says. “I think humans have been put on this planet to benefit each other, and to be here for each other.”
That she makes it look easy doesn’t mean that it is. “I’m not fearless walking through this world,” Henson says. “I’m scared as shit right now with this election. I have anxiety like you can’t even imagine. But I can manage it when I understand what I’m dealing with.” When she feels overwhelmed, she tends to get “quiet and still.” Then she asks herself a question: Will the thing she’s afraid of kill her? “Most times [the answer is] no,” she says. “Then what are you afraid of? You’ve got to deal with it, you’ve gotta talk to it. You can’t ignore it.”
Earlier, when we first meet at Sunset Tower in Los Angeles, she expresses little patience for those who haven’t done the work she has: “I don’t do well in fear-based situations,” she says. “If you’re moving in fear, I move far the fuck away from you, because you’re about to do something stupid.”
“As early as kindergarten I was rambunctious, full of energy,” Henson says, sipping an iced mocha latte in a dark corner of the restaurant. The multihyphenate, who recently turned 54, still vividly recalls when she sang “Tomorrow” from Annie at her kindergarten graduation. “I did something funny first, before I sang, and the audience laughed. I was like, ‘That’s power.’
Born and raised in Washington, DC, Henson had teachers and family members who supported her penchant for performance from the get-go. “My dreams were nurtured as a kid,” she says. “All my loved ones saw that I had this thing, and they all kind of chipped in how they could, even if it was just [cheering me on].”
At age 13, though, Henson thought her acting dreams were over before they even began. She auditioned to go to DC’s Duke Ellington School of the Arts for high school. Her best friend got in, but Henson was rejected. “I thought they was telling me I couldn’t act. So in my mind, that was it for me.”
Henson walked away, even going so far as to enroll at North Carolina A&T State University, where she intended to study electrical engineering. But the path to one of her classes passed directly by the theater, and one day she couldn’t take it anymore. She memorized a monologue and auditioned without telling a single one of her friends. “I was shaking. Fear had gotten the best of me,” she recalls now. “I don’t even know if words were coming out of my mouth. I just remember telling myself, ‘You suck, you’re horrible, you’re bad.’” At the end of the audition she ran out of the room. She could never even bring herself to check if she’d gotten a callback. “I let fear beat me.”
A year into her schooling at N.C. A&T, Henson failed a precalculus course. Henson called her dad, who surprised her by saying the failure was a good thing. “It was a slap in my face,” she says. “But [my father] was literally like, ‘Shake that damn devil off and stop letting that fear get the best of you. Fear and fate can’t coexist, you’ve gotta pick a side.’”
She got back in the game and auditioned for the theater department at Howard University (her second HBCU). This time, she got in. “When I finally refocused myself and said, ‘It’s acting,’ there was no looking back for me.” she says. “I said, ‘I’m going to master this shit. No one is going to say I can’t act ever, ever again.’”
