Hollywood Wasn’t Ready for Natalie Desselle
By: Evette Dionne
Tags: Hollywood, Culture, Equality, Natalie Desselle, Black Women

Hollywood Wasn’t Ready for Natalie Desselle

Natalie Desselle at a red carpet premiere. Photo: John Shearer/Getty Images

Robert Townsend’s 1997 film, B.A.P.S., is one of the most beloved films in the canon of Black comedies for good reason: It follows Nisi (Halle Berry) and Mickey (Natalie Desselle), two waitresses working in a Georgia restaurant who spend their entire life savings to travel to California and land Nisi a role in a life-changing music video. Their dream is to use the money Nisi will earn from the video to open a combination soul-food restaurant and hair salon, but nothing about their trip goes as planned. They’re ensnared in a plot to trick a terminally ill millionaire out of his fortune and spend the remainder of the movie realizing that it’s worthless to earn $10,000 and live in a mansion if it comes at the expense of dirtying their souls.

Though Berry’s clearly meant to be the film’s star, every time Desselle appears on the screen — with a unique hairstyle that spells out “boo yow” on the back, a bright-yellow patent leather suit, and comedic chops for days — she absolutely steals the show.

There are no shortage of scenes that showcase how hilarious Desselle could be, but there’s one that comes to mind: As Nisi stands in the long line outside of the music-video auditions, trying to show up her fellow competitors with increasingly ridiculous moves, a look of absolute proudness comes across Mickey’s face. She’s the only one who applauds when Nisi’s done dancing, and she jets forward to declare that her friend is the surefire frontrunner to be the “music video girl of the world”: “That’s my girl! That’s my girl. Yeah. Yeah. Baby, we’ve got this,” she boasts proudly before spinning around to showcase the back of her hair. “Boo yow!”

It’s one of many ways in which Desselle proves herself a worthy costar, including throwing out iconic one-liners like, “You know, Alfred, Batman’s homeboy” and “Living large and taking charge, big boy!” and flopping around a wet floor in a plastic outfit after figuring out a bidet is not what she and Nisi presumed it to be. But it was Desselle’s ability to tap into a range of emotions that made her stand out in films ranging from the cult 1997 hit How to Be a Player and the ABC made-for-TV rendition of Cinderella to the short-lived sitcom Eve.

She could make us laugh, smile, and cry in the span of a single film or TV episode, so it never actually mattered if she was billed as the project’s star or costar; she always found a way to shine. When Desselle died on December 7 at the age of 53 from colon cancer, a disease that’s disproportionately striking Black people at much younger ages, I wondered how expansive her catalog could’ve been if Hollywood had allowed her to transcend being the copilot or the age-old fat sidekick. Often, the fat sidekick is cast to be comedic relief, but in Desselle’s case, she was often a part of a one-two comedic punch with an actor smaller than her. In How to Be a Player, she’s the pesky younger sister to Dre (Bill Bellamy), a music executive who spends the majority of time juggling multiple women with the hopes of keeping his girlfriend from finding out. In Cinderella, she’s one of the three stepsisters trying to thwart the title star’s (Brandy) princess destiny. And in Madea’s Big Happy Family (2011), she’s one of several daughters in a chaotic family coming to terms with their mother’s terminal illness.

Her inability to land roles that showcased all she could do as a comedic actor is a direct result of the prism in which Hollywood chose to see her through.

Outside of these culturally significant projects, Desselle’s resume doesn’t begin to encompass the breadth of her talent — it’s littered with made-for-TV movies with significant gaps between projects — and that wasn’t her fault. Her inability to land roles that showcased all she could do as a comedic actor is a direct result of the prism in which Hollywood chose to see her through.

Though times have surely changed, fat women in Hollywood, especially those who are Black, have a long history of being typecast in one-dimensional roles that rely on the size of their body to drive the storyline. There has been a bevy of fat characters, including Mo’Nique’s Jazmin in Phat Girlz (2006) and Chrissy Metz’s Kate on This Is Us, who are so obsessed with losing weight that there’s little room for anything else in their lives. There are also fat characters devoid of any sign of sexuality, resigning themselves instead to being a caretaker or a friend, like nearly every role Loretta Devine has been cast in since Waiting to Exhale (1995). There are even fat characters who exist solely to be the punchline for their smaller friends, as comedic actor Rebel Wilson has been in several films.

Though some actors have broken the mold — Queen Latifah has been the protagonist in several rom-coms, Retta portrays a woman in a loving marriage on Good Girls, and Natasha Rothwell’s Kelli holds her own on Insecure — there are still few opportunities for fat Black women to carve a different acting path that isn’t built on the archetypes that already exist.

Had Desselle’s career began in this era, as more Black women are beginning to create their own lanes and call their own shots, she might have been one of Hollywood’s brightest stars. Instead, we must recall all of the joy she brought us and also reckon with all she could have done in her time had the industry not sidelined her because of its lack of imagination. When Desselle’s death was announced, Berry released a statement that read in part, “Natalie represented actual black women, not what black women are perceived to be. For that she was often underrated, passed over — deprived of the platform she truly deserved.”

We will always remember the laughter that Desselle brought to the world in the short time she was able to display it, but we should also remember how much of her genius we were deprived of because she, like many of those who came before her, couldn’t escape being typecast as the fat costar unworthy of being treated like the star.