Five Tyler Perry Films Later, Taraji P. Henson Is Still Saying Yes

The five films

• The Family That Preys
• I Can Do Bad All by Myself
• Acrimony
• Straw
• Why Did I Get Married Again (2026)

None of these are small roles. Perry keeps handing her women who hold a family together with their fingernails, and she keeps accepting. That is not nothing in an industry that loves to hand a brilliant actress a supporting slot and call it a day. These five parts are the opposite: they are the load-bearing wall of every story they appear in.

Perry has always run something close to a repertory company. He writes for actors he has already watched deliver, the way a playwright writes for a company he knows by heart, and Henson is one of the people he writes for without needing to explain anything. That shorthand shows up on screen as ease.

Why Roselyn feels different

Roselyn is not the comic relief and not the villain. She enters with her toes dipped in gold and a secret, then spends the film trying to repair a relationship with a son who resents the years she spent working and emotionally absent. It is a quieter part than Cookie Lyon and a more grounded one than Shug Avery. I think that is exactly why Perry keeps calling her: Henson can make a woman who has made real mistakes still feel worth rooting for.

Roselyn's secret, when it finally comes out, is not a scandal so much as a confession. Her boyfriend Nick is the younger man, and the deeper wound is with Wesley, who spent his childhood resenting her long hours without understanding that his father's addiction had left her carrying everything alone. Watching Henson deliver that apology is the most quietly human thing in the film.

Before Perry, she built one of the more durable careers in the business. She grew up in Washington, D.C., paid for college by working as a Pentagon secretary and a singing waitress on a dinner-cruise ship, and studied drama at Howard University. She was nominated for an Oscar for playing Queenie in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, won a Golden Globe as Cookie Lyon on Empire, and played Katherine Johnson in Hidden Figures. This year she also began a Broadway run in Joe Turner's Come and Gone.

Then there is the detail that stays with me. Her first and middle names, Taraji and Penda, come from Swahili and mean 'hope' and 'love.' A woman named hope-and-love has spent a career playing women who refuse to be small, and now she plays a mother trying to say the hard thing to her grown son. Her 2016 memoir, Around the Way Girl, became a New York Times bestseller, and she runs the Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation, which supports mental health in Black communities. That is the through-line of all five films.

Part of why the pairing works is that Perry trusts Henson to play imperfect women without sanding them down. Roselyn is rich, glamorous, and wrong about her son, all at once. A lesser movie would have made her the villain or the saint. This one lets her be both, which is the thing Henson has always done best.

So the next time those two names show up together in your queue, you know what you are watching. It is not a casting stunt. It is two people who keep choosing to work together, on stories about families, secrets, and the cost of telling the truth.