Yahoo News Tiffany Boone on ‘Hunters,’ ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ and Why She Addressed Her Exit From ‘The Chi’
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On Monday, actor Tiffany Boone broke her silence and posted a letter to her social media channels addressing her exit from Showtime’s “The Chi” after making supervisors aware of alleged misconduct by her former co-star Jason Mitchell. In the letter, Boone discussed her decision-making process and the media coverage — and social media commentary — that followed the story.
Speaking to Variety at the premiere of her Amazon series “Hunters,” her first public appearance since publishing the letter, Boone discussed the timing of her missive.
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“You know, it’s been awhile since all of that happened, since everything came out. I work on my own time. I wanted to deal with it the way I wanted to deal with it,” Boone said. “I didn’t feel like I owed anyone anything. I was going through my own experience.”
“Now seemed like the right time to just tell the part of the story that I wanted to tell,” the actor said, of her post, which didn’t offer specifics about the incident or mention Mitchell by name. Boone captioned the post “feeling grateful and free.”
“And I knew obviously that I was going to have to do press for [‘Hunters’],” Boone said, considering the venue of the interview. “Starting this process, I wanted to close one chapter before I started a beautiful new one. And I’m really grateful for all the support I’ve gotten from it and all the people who shared their stories with me because of it.”
As Boone wrote in her post, she’s focusing on her new career opportunities, including playing Nazi hunter Roxy Jones opposite Al Pacino and Logan Lerman in Amazon Prime Video’s “Hunters” and appearing in Hulu’s “Little Fires Everywhere” as a younger version of Kerry Washington’s lead character Mia. Of playing the same character as Washington, Boone said it was the “challenge of a lifetime and so much fun.”
“I’ve been a fan of Kerry since she did ‘Lift,’ which is this little indie that she did [in 2001], I watched that a million times,” Boone said. “So being able to create a character with her — obviously she already had the base and I came in and took as much as I could — I feel like I kind of, because I’ve been watching her so long, it’s like I had the cheat sheet.”
For her role in “Hunters,” a series about vigilantes hunting down Nazis hiding in 1970s America, the challenge is balancing the show’s sometimes lighthearted tone with its graphic violence. Explaining why she signed on, Boone credited David Weil’s script, calling the writer “a fricking genius.”
“I was just so drawn to a story that I’ve never seen myself in [as a black woman],” she explained. “It’s beautiful that I can find my own place in it.”
“I think is such an interesting mix of like drama, historical context in comedy and also like just a lot of lighter themes that you might not be expecting with a topic like this,” she continued. “So I think depending on who you are, you might just have very different visceral reactions. But at the end, I just hope everyone loves it and can be as excited about it as we were making it.”
And of getting the chance to work with Pacino in the series, she added, “I didn’t know that he was signed on to the project when I was auditioning and whatnot. But it was a beautiful little blessing cherry on top.”
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