Blair Underwood, Lena Waithe and others celebrated the happy news with ET while promoting their new Hulu horror film.
Ahead of the Hulu debut of Justin Simien’s horror satire, Bad Hair, Kelly Rowland announced she is pregnant. In the ensemble film, Rowland plays famed ‘80s R&B singer Sandra, alongside Blair Underwood, Lena Waithe, newcomer Elle Lorraine and others.
“That’s the thing, we all feel like we’re part of the same tribe, we’re part of the same family, we’re part of the same community. So, it feels like our family is growing when you see this news,” Waithe told ET about learning about the exciting news that the singer and her husband, Tim Weatherspoon, are expecting their second child together. “Also, because of this climate, there’s a lot of bad news that you have to see all the time as you’re scrolling through your timeline. So, I think that the news was a welcome change and I’m just excited for her and Tim. They’re such an amazing family and she’s an amazing human being. If anyone should be having more kids, it’s Kelly Rowland.”
Echoing her co-star’s sentiment, Lorraine also gushed about Rowland’s happy news. “She’s beautiful. She’s an incredible woman and mother,” she said. “What a gift to her and to the world. I’m so happy.”
Meanwhile, Underwood shared a direct message to his co-star: “Kelly, God bless you, and congratulations. Enjoy this second, amazing miracle that you’re bringing into the world,” he said, adding, “It’s a beautiful thing.”
Telling the story of a young woman named Anna (Lorraine), hoping to become an on-air host at a music television station, Bad Hair shows the sinister side of show business and the harmful sacrifices one makes to meet impossible demands in order to rise to stardom. In Anna’s case, it’s being forced to get a weave similar to her idol, Sandra, who previously underwent a dramatic transformation to boost her success. However, the weave proves to be evil, as it slowly takes over Anna’s body and forces her to commit horrible crimes all while giving her the leg up she needed at work.
While the film is fictional, it’s hard not to imagine that Sandra is a stand-in for some of the biggest R&B stars of the time. “She’s giving you a little bit of Janet [Jackson], she’s giving you Jody Watley, some Karyn White, honey,” writer and director Justin Simien revealed. “She’s bringing you all the nache.”
Sandra even echoes what Vanessa L. Williams, who plays a tough boss to please named Zora, went through early in her career. “I lived in 1989. I had an album out back in the day, so I knew that world,” she said, revealing the pivotal role she plays in the film. “My character… she has to be enticing enough to make [Anna] want to change her appearance in order to get ahead, which so many of us have done in our lifetimes to move to the next step in our careers.”
Williams added, “I thought it was very appropriate and relevant to where we are [today].”
Inspired by Korean horror films like The Wig, Simien ultimately wanted to use that idea to show how Black women are controlled by a capitalist system. “I realized that hair, this thing that grows out of our head naturally, is used in so many ways to control us,” he said, clarifying that he “didn’t want to make a movie that shamed anybody for making any kind of choices whatsoever.”
Simien concluded, “I wanted to point out that, like, Black folks and Black women in particular are just given less choices of how to be in the world. And that, to me, is actually horrifying.”
Bad Hair premieres Friday, Oct. 23 on Hulu.
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