As Jill Scott gets ready to drop her long-awaited sixth studio album “To Whom This May Concern (Human Re Sources/The Orchard),” she’s opening up about a different creative outlet of hers: her movie career. Specifically, she’s reflecting on the 2007, Tyler Perry-directed film “Why Did I Get Married?”—but unfortunately, what she has to reveal isn’t all that great.
Suggested Reading
Sitting down for a new interview with Angie Martinez for her “IRL” podcast, Scott took a trip down memory lane to share some memories of her time working on that set. While her experience was mostly positive, she shed a little light on what it was like portraying her character Sheila and what she subsequently had to go through in order to authentically bring her character to life.
If you’ll remember, Sheila was a plus-sized woman who was married to Mike (played by Richard T. Jones). Sadly, Mike regularly and horribly mistreated Sheila and often made comments about her weight that led to her having low self esteem and getting constantly getting ridiculed. Seeing as how that meant Scott herself had to endure some harsh treatment through her character, she told Martinez that she wasn’t too fond of how negatively people in the cast were talking about her character.
Specifically, Scott recalled the airplane scene—where Sheila is heading alongside Mike and her “friend” Trina up to the mountains for their annual couples trip but is then made to drive up the snowy road by herself because her weight was too much for the airline seats and other passengers. Noting how she had to put on a fat suit for the role, Scott explained how that whole event was unpleasant for her due to the extras Perry had on set.
“I didn’t like how much people would make fun of her. I didn’t, I didn’t like that. I remember the scene on the plane and–the scene on the plane Tyler [Perry] had extras make fun of me when I got on the plane. They were just going back and forth, making jokes about Sheila’s weight,” she explained. “And obviously, you know, I had on a whole fat suit and it was cumbersome. So the walk was genuine and the sitting down was genuine and all the things.”
She later continued: “The folks on the flight really went in on fat jokes and it sucked….I felt like it was [a little abusive]. Sorry Tyler, I hated that sh*t…sincerely hated that. They were just going at it”
Scott went on to say that she may have told Perry “once or twice” about her feelings of that experience and that that moment filming made her reframe how she viewed her own body.
“I decided that I am not fat, but I have some. And it made me feel better, and that’s how I decided to move through my life. Like, you’re not gonna define me as a ‘thing.’ I’m multicolor, I’m multi-dimensional,” she explained.
While Scott’s experience with the extras on the film may have been negative, she had nothing but positive words to say about Jones.
“Richard T. Jones is one literally one of the nicest people on the planet. And so funny and so cool. [In the movie] he was terrible. He was horrible, so mean,” Scott said.
She later joked that she would “bite him and hug him” if she ran into him out on the streets.
Straight From 
Sign up for our free daily newsletter.