Sanaa Lathan shaved her head to "always take a nap" and let her kiss her natural hair like never before

During her 20-year career, Sanaa Lathan has been transformed to play many different roles. Yet while she became an athlete for Love & Basketball and a cop for Fireshe has never done anything that looks like her new movie asked her. Lathan shaved his head for Napply Ever After, streaming on Netflix now, and the change has pushed to embrace her natural hair in a way that she has not been able to before.

"It definitely changes your relationship with yourself and how you feel about the world and that makes you – or at least it makes me – rethink my beliefs about myself, about beauty, about what I'm doing. wait for others and how they think of me, "says Lathan on the phone.

The actor may have just shaved her head for the film, but as she explains, her new hairstyle has affected her true sense of self. And a year later, with Lathan now what she calls a "teeny weeny afro", the effects are still going on. "Last year, there was a lot of brainstorming, and I really think it has to do with this new thing – this physical thing," she says.

When Lathan signed for the first time Napply Ever After years ago both actor and producer, she "[didn’t] I think I would shave my head. I thought maybe we were going to do something, like smoke and mirrors, with a bald prosthetic cap. "But after sitting with the character for a few years and having to deal with what she calls" hair exhaustion "an intense worry about her hair – Lathan realized that she just wanted to let everything go.

"I've been an actress in this business forever, and obviously a woman forever," she explains. "The whole hair, being an actress and being a black woman with very thick and frizzy hair – it can sometimes run out."

To film the heartbreaking scene in which Lathan's character, Violet Jones, shaves his head after a bad break and a drunken evening, the actor received a wig to train. "I never used clippers! Explain. But when it was time for the real thing, she stood in front of a camera and shaved all the hair off her head. "It was really moving," she recalls. "I did not decide anything that I would do as a character or as a character during the scene, I just let everything happen and I'm just blown away by the number of emotions that I have. have lived. " And as emotionally difficult as the experience was, the actor said "it was a kind of life changing".

In Napply Ever AfterViolet is a businesswoman who grew up by combining straight hair to perfection. Every morning, she straighten her hair and wear makeup so that she is perfect when her boyfriend, Clint, wakes up. It's a tale that, unfortunately, Lathan says to patronize. When she started working in the industry in the mid-90s, says the actor, it was expected that black women would change their hair to not be better, to whiter.

"You were always getting the message again and again, especially as an actress, that you would not work if you had your own natural hair," says Lathan. "How many times do I have, even though I've been in a hurry, and even though I was making a rash … I would get the comments many times:" Oh, can she have hair more like this girl? "And this girl would have liked, long straight hair, or she would have a long weave."

This constant negativity around his hair affected the way the actor saw himself. "You can not work with your natural hair and you're not as beautiful with your natural hair," she recalls. Now, however, she sees that things are beginning to change, even in her own career. After the shoot Napply Ever After, Lathan booked a role in Showtime season 4 L & # 39; s case, a role for which she was ready to wear a wig. She did two screen tests, one with a long straight wig and the other with her natural hair, which was just starting to grow back. I just knew that they were going to say "We like long hair," recalls Lathan. "And they said," Oh no, we like your short hair a lot better, your natural hair is really beautiful. "

This is one of the few times the actor has been on screen with natural hair. Love & Basketball and of course, Napply Ever After. Different parties require different hairstyles, and it is likely that, sooner or later, Lathan will choose to wear a wig for a party in the future. But ideally, it will be because the character is calling him, not because Hollywood has ruled that his own natural hair was somehow undesirable.