There is a specific kind of vertigo that comes with leaving a movie theater in the middle of the day. The world is suddenly too bright, too loud, and slightly unreal. You have, after all, been inside someone else’s carefully constructed reality for two hours. And then you are back outside, blinking into the afternoon light, not quite returned to yourself, the movie still clinging to you like perfume. It is in this particular state of cinematic suspension that I meet Nia Long for an early lunch in a quiet corner at the Chateau Marmont.
I have just seen Michael, the upcoming Michael Jackson biopic, a month ahead of its April release. I am still turning the film over in my mind when Long, who portrays Jackson family matriarch Katherine Jackson, arrives looking chic yet low-key. She wears an oversized blazer, wide-leg jeans, and a Miu Miu baseball cap pulled low over her eyes. As we ease ourselves into the conversation, I am struck by the strange doubling effect of that movie vertigo: the woman sitting right before me and the woman I have just watched on screen are layered like two transparencies held up to the light, distinct yet echoing one another.
On screen, Long plays Katherine Jackson with a studied stillness. The very first time we see her, watching her boys rehearse, the frame holds on her loving face for just a few beats. She says almost nothing, and she doesn’t have to. Juxtaposed against Colman Domingo’s blustering portrayal of Joe Jackson and Jaafar Jackson’s uncanny performance as his late uncle Michael, Long has found a way to make silence load-bearing. Restraint is the most visible thing in any scene she occupies, a testament to her decades-long mastery of her craft.
Yet, in person, she seems the absolute opposite of restrained. She is blunt but exceptionally warm, possessing a dry sense of humor and a deep well of emotional intelligence. She is very much a Scorpio, noticing everything that happens around her. In playing Mrs. Jackson, who is still alive at the age of 95, Long has tapped into the part of herself that understands how to let silence do the heavy lifting. The word she continually reaches for when describing the matriarch—a word she returns to several times throughout our conversation—is grace.
“There have been moments in my life where I’ve been required to be more graceful than I’ve ever had to be in the past,” she reflects. “And that requires a sense of really being able to dig deep into some sort of self-examination. Like, what do I stand for? What’s important to me, ultimately, regardless of Hollywood, the noise? And number one, for me personally, my children come before anything. And so I think when you look at Michael’s journey, and you look at Katherine’s journey, the only way you thrive and survive is through a tremendous amount of grace.” She pauses, letting the thought settle. “What I think I learned from her is that sometimes grace is really quiet.”
Long occupies a rare place in cultural memory that few actors ever attain. For a certain generation, she is the platonic ideal of ’90s fine—a phrase that encompasses not just physical beauty or aesthetic appeal, but a very specific cultural feeling. Watching her as Nina in Love Jones, Jordan in The Best Man, or Lisa in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, one immediately conjures up a place, time, and attitude entirely synonymous with Long herself. Of course, there is the enduring image, and then there is the human being sitting across from me, ordering her go-to lunch of salmon with a side of mustard. As she eats, I ask what she thinks about the heavy iconography and nostalgia that persistently surrounds her.
“My commitment to work is not for accolades or attention, or even to be famous, quite honestly,” she says. “But I do think because of my commitment to truth and purpose, there is a thing, and I don’t know what that thing is, that people see in my work. And it makes them feel good. It makes them feel inspired. It makes them feel like they know me.”
In a fickle Hollywood landscape that remains notoriously volatile, particularly for Black actors, Long does not take the longevity and affection she has cultivated for granted. “There’s highs and lows,” Long admits candidly. “I’m having a great year, but I don’t know what’s happening next year.”
Having starred in several iconic Black films throughout her career, Long has always maintained a strict intentionality regarding how she portrays her characters. Much like her approach to Katherine Jackson, she works to construct a version of the person that feels deeply, authentically true to life.
“The only strategy I have in this game is my bank account. Let’s strategize how we’re going to make money and create generational wealth. That is where I’m strategic,” she says with a laugh, pausing to scratch her palm. “My hand just started itching the minute I said money. That’s a good thing. Maybe something’s happening. Something’s coming.”
Once she commits to a project, however, the work becomes deeply personal. “I work hard to make sure that when I represent us, it’s not just someone putting their agenda on me. Whether it’s my hair, my makeup, my wardrobe, my lines.”
Now that her eldest son is in his 20s and her youngest son, at 14, is old enough to stay home by himself, the actor feels ready to expand in all directions. She wants to continue producing more films and crafting new stories both behind and in front of the camera. She shares details about a new film she has just wrapped shooting in New York titled Don’t Ever Wonder, a romantic dramedy (“if that even exists anymore”) three years in the making. The project features her onscreen reunion with Love Jones leading man Larenz Tate. Directed by Eugene Ashe and featuring an ensemble cast that includes Blair Underwood, Susan Kelechi Watson, and Algee Smith, the film focuses heavily on second acts.
“This is not a continuation of Love Jones,” she emphasizes. “This is a continuation of love, and of what happens once you’ve had your kids, they’re off to college, and you’re empty nesters. And that’s kind of where the story begins. There’s a lot of funny and there’s a lot of heartbreak, and I think it’s a really honest story.”
In talking to Long, it becomes clear that honesty and truth are what she values most in the stories she tells, as well as in her everyday life. Perhaps that is what compels me, somewhere in the middle of our lunch, to drop my guard. I mention that I am conducting the interview a little out of sorts, having recently ended a 12-year relationship.
“Okay, but when was it really over?” she asks.
“You didn’t have to gag me like that!” I reply.
She laughs warmly. I tell her that I am trying to imagine what life will look like—what I will look like—on the other side of this breakup. That is when the concept of grace surfaces once again in our dialogue.
In 2022, Long navigated that peculiar, punishing aspect of modern fame where a private heartbreak becomes public news overnight: her partner’s highly publicized cheating scandal that ultimately resulted in the end of their 13-year relationship. She doesn’t have to delve deeply into the painful details, I assure her, but the actor doesn’t shy away from the topic. On the other side of the experience with her ex, with whom she now maintains a healthy co-parenting relationship, she speaks with unflinching clarity about the ordeal.
“The amount of pouring into myself that I’ve done is strong and mighty and intentional. I’ve now identified the things that I need to work on and the things that I need to heal. But I have also identified what is intolerable.”
That clarity has been hard-won. When the scandal broke, it was met with a massive groundswell of public support from fans, a fierce protectiveness over Long as both a woman and a cultural touchstone. Yet, whenever she speaks publicly about it, I am struck by how her gratitude for that support is always carefully tempered with nuance.
“I’m proud of myself for giving so much grace. For being able to say people make mistakes and things happen. It’s life. When the stakes are high, the news is big. I can’t do anything about that, but I don’t have to protect my ego in any of this,” she states matter-of-factly, which appears to be the only mode she operates in.
In that same straightforward tone, she suggests I write out everything I need to say to my ex without actually sending it, noting that ultimately, “it’s not about another person’s behavior. It’s about your bottom line and the magnitude in which you’re committed to self-love.”
She adds, “I don’t think it’s healthy to hold onto things because then you’re just walking around with this burdensome energy. It could be writing it down. It could be meditation. It could be prayer. There’s a lot of ways to manage the noise. But you don’t have to respond to the noise with the undercurrent of your own trauma.”
I copy down her words, finding them useful not just for my own situation, but because they capture the essence of what I have watched Long do throughout our entire conversation: extract the essential lesson from whatever life hands her.
Currently, Long is working on her first memoir, a process she describes as one of the “biggest, bravest, challenging” things she has ever undertaken. It has been a two-year journey, marking a constant negotiation with her own relationship to letting go.
“I can read something I wrote two years ago and go: ‘Oh no, that’s not actually how I feel about that now,’” she notes. Her late father, Doughtry Long Jr., a poet who passed away in 2020, once told her that the hardest thing about writing is knowing when to stop. “And I’m like: When is that going to happen? Because I haven’t gotten there yet.”
The memoir takes her back to Iowa City, where she spent six years of her childhood while her mother attended university. Born in Brooklyn into a Trinidadian household where everyone on the block was Black, living in the Midwest during her formative years meant she encountered very few other Black girls, initially disorienting her relationship to race and identity.
“In writing this memoir, I realized the impact that experience had on my own view of beauty,” she reflects. “And my own self-acceptance of being a pretty brown-skinned little girl growing up in Iowa. I thought I was beautiful because my mother said it and my family said it, but the world told me something different.” She lets that reality sit in the air. “So to now be a face for Estée Lauder, it’s kind of ironic, because I didn’t feel beautiful until Black Hollywood said I was beautiful.”
The fact that an entire generation of Black women found a reflection of genuine beauty in Nia Long while Long herself was still waiting to see it highlights the complexities of societal beauty standards and the immense labor required to transform them. The concept of being ’90s fine did not emerge from a vacuum; it served as a vital corrective—Black Hollywood’s answer to a century of mainstream media rendering Black women invisible or casting them in ways entirely outside of their control. Long’s most iconic characters, and Long herself, ushered in a new standard for the Black leading lady, one that was expansive in some ways while remaining restrictive in others. Now, three decades later, Long embodies an entirely new facet of womanhood in Hollywood.
The phrase “Black don’t crack” is constantly lobbed at Black women, ostensibly as a compliment, yet it occasionally erases the very real pressures of aging, particularly on a public stage where audiences store an unchanging image of you in their minds.
However, Long has no interest in pretending the human body does not transform over time. “I’m 55. I got hormonal stuff going. Your body shifts, changes. It’s a whole new body.” She is far from wistful about it. She happily ate truffle parmesan fries during our lunch and appears completely unconflicted about the physical changes that come with time. Mentioning the upcoming press tour for Michael, she notes that while she wants to wear beautiful gowns, she also intends to keep eating French fries.
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“I don’t deprive myself of anything that I want,” she says. “I find the balance.”
Beauty was never her primary currency, she insists. Instead, her true inheritances are internal: her father’s intellectual curiosity and her mother’s fierce self-possession. Tattooed and free-spirited, her mother once wore leg warmers in the dead of summer simply because they matched her outfit, entirely unbothered by what anyone thought. As an embarrassed child, Long would beg her mother to take them off, a plea her mother always ignored. Looking back as an adult, Long recognizes the immense power and freedom in that unapologetic stance.
Our plates are eventually cleared away, and Long prepares to head home for a pizza party with her youngest son and his friends. Before she departs, I ask her what freedom means to her at this stage in her life.
“Being able to do what you want to do when you want to do it, because it serves your spirit, not what everyone else thinks you need to be or should be,” she answers. That type of freedom, Long adds, does not require a grand audience. “You don’t have to have anyone else’s permission to do what you love. And it doesn’t have to be on the big stage. It could be in your kitchen. I know I have freedom right now to make a pizza. I’m going to do it.”
