Gabourey Sidibe Has Never Needed Everybody To Like Her

Gabourey Sidibe has spent years being asked about and praised for her confidence. She would like it noted that she never volunteered to become anyone’s mascot for it.

“The confidence conversation has been around me since 2009,” Sidibe tells HelloBeautiful, “and I promise you, I didn’t start it.”

What’s more compelling and revealing about Sidibe isn’t confidence at all. It’s the way she has spent a lifetime willing herself away from sadness. “I was an unhappy child. I really was,” she says. “I think that I was purposely doing my best to shape and create happiness and joy, even though I did not feel it.” Humor became “my way of coping,” a way of “trying to heal myself and just trying to feel good.”

Now, as a wife, mother of twins, actor and director, joy is still the assignment, she just measures it differently. “My favorite compliment as an adult is that I feel safe to other people,” she says. “‘I feel like I can say this to you because you’re safe’…that’s my favorite compliment.”

Sidibe’s safety contains multitudes. The kindness of clarity dwells within her safe space. If there’s an elephant in the room, best believe Gabby’s walking towards it and trying to get it out of the room. “I’ve been like this my whole life,” Sibide shared. “I still think it’s better to say, ‘Hey, what was that about, and how could we figure that out?’”

That instinct goes back to childhood. Sidibe remembers being 11 and her stepmom called her an ugly name. The comment was upsetting her younger brother, so young Sidibe confronted her stepmom. She wasn’t trying to fight. She wanted to understand the problem and fix it. “I said, ‘Barbara. This is Shirley,’” Sidibe laughed at the memory. She said her addressing the issue head-on wasn’t well-received and she decided to remove herself from the situation. Sidibe likes solutions, not problems.

Gabourey Sidibe Talks Raven–Symoné Interview

Decades later, Sidibe’s approach hasn’t changed. On her recent appearance on Raven–Symoné and co.’s “Tea Time” podcast, she directly addressed the tension she had felt between them while they worked together on “Empire.” The moment became a headline almost immediately. 

“Girl, I didn’t think you liked me,” Sidibe said to Symoné with a laugh. When Symoné asked why she had that impression, she quickly replied, “Because you treated me like you didn’t like me. I was actually here like, ‘What’s up? I’m going to be on whatever time [you’re] on,’ ” Sidibe added.

She shared with HelloBeautiful that she was shocked to see the booking email and in her response to her manager, she said, “I was, like, ‘oh, I should probably ask about that,’ because now I’m confused?”

In the “Tea Time” podcast, Sidibe revealed that a mutual friend of hers and Symoné’s told her that Symoné made some folks promise not to be friends with her. 

“I don’t see any value in really having secrets and talking about people behind their back,” she says. “If I said it, and you weren’t there, I’m probably gonna say it when you are present. I’m also not interested in being mean and hurting people.”

Even while revisiting what happened with Raven, Sidibe found herself offering her fellow actress grace and she considered how spending nearly an entire life in the public eye could shape someone. She says she was “gaining a lot more grace for her” as they talked. “We had a lovely conversation,” Sidibe says. “It was so fun.”

That impulse to name a thing, understand it, and move forward also makes sense of Sidibe’s evolution behind the camera. She directed Tisha Campbell, Russell Hornsby, and Mekhi Phifer in “Mary J. Blige Presents Be Happy,” and says directing gives her an ownership that acting doesn’t always allow. “I bleed a little bit more as a director,” she says. “This is not only how I see the world, this is how I want you to see the world.”

And that vision is deeply rooted in who she is. “I love being a woman. I love being Black and, more than anything, I love being a Black woman,” Sidibe says. “Everything that I do is a love letter to me, to you, and to us.”

She almost denied herself that love. Sidibe admits she initially turned down directing opportunities because she didn’t believe she was smart enough to do the job. “I am flawed. I am not fearless,” she says. “But sometimes I do it anyway.” Sidibe had to decide that she wouldn’t let her fear be stronger than her faith and took the step towards directing.

Taking A Leap

“I’m happy. I love being a director and I would not have gotten to know what that feels like and to be proud of myself as such, without taking that leap of faith.”

And she kept leaping. Sidibe found love and created a family and the life on the other side of that fear that used to stop her looks beautifully ordinary: meaningful work, home by 5 where her husband and twins greet her at the door with run-on sentence tales of their day, and ideally, Gabby in bed by 8:30. “I’m so corny. I used to be cooler than this!” she laughs.

“With them, I’m having the best time of my life,” she says. She thinks back on that sad little girl, knowing her current life was impossible for that version of her to picture. “I was so deeply unhappy that I could not have seen this coming,” Sidibe says. “I did not see this coming. It is incredible, and I do think that it is a lot of the work that I did just trying to find joy (and therapy), but also doing my best to craft and create my own joy.”

The little girl who once had to manufacture joy just to feel some has built a home full of it. She makes art. She makes people laugh. She makes people feel safe. 

Sidibe told me earlier that she believes in faking it until you make it and when it comes to joy, she thinks she’s finally made it. But maybe she wasn’t faking it all those years. Maybe she was just practicing.