Tiffany Haddish, as Duana noted after the Oscars, is a Star. She has It. When Tiffany Haddish is around, all you want to be looking at or listening to is Tiffany Haddish. And she is beginning to have projects built around her, as Stars do, including one called The Kitchen. It’s based on a Vertigo comic about mob wives who take over the business after their husbands are arrested in 1970s Hell’s Kitchen. Haddish was the first on board. She was then joined by Melissa McCarthy, and now Elisabeth Moss is the latest to sign on, playing the abused wife of one of the mobsters. McCarthy and Moss are no joke—McCarthy is a Star in her own right, and Moss is one of the busiest and most admired actresses of the Peak TV age. But with Haddish in the cast, it’s a little “Tiffany and everyone else”, which is not a snub on the others but a testament to Haddish’s sheer star power. She dominates the room, as they say.
I am super into this movie. One, I’m interested to see McCarthy and Haddish in something more dramatic. They’re both great comedians, so they can definitely do drama—good comedians can always do drama but that is not a two-way street for dramatic actors—but we’ve not seen Haddish do drama. (McCarthy has a more serious turn coming up in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, a biopic of notable literary forger Lee Israel.) The Kitchen is a comic book, but it’s not bright and bouncy Marvel. Vertigo comics are usually darker, weirder, more dramatically inclined and seriously themed. So this will be a darker and definitely more violent movie than we’re used to from McCarthy and, more recently Haddish. It’s kind of a Bella Mafia vibe by way of pulp serials, with Elisabeth Moss, Melissa McCarthy, and Tiffany Haddish. I’d see those three in any movie, I will definitely see them in a movie where they take over the mob.
Attached - Tiffany Haddish at SXSW earlier this month.
