By the second half of the ’90s, Black talent seemed to be everywhere on screen. The explosion of hip-hop helped catapult the music video era. Black audiences had a plethora of TV shows like “Living Single,” “Moesha” and “The Wayans Bros.” And there was always a new Black movie to catch in theaters — from “Waiting to Exhale” to “Eve’s Bayou” and “Love Jones.”
On top of that, Black actors were in demand. Not only by the many Black filmmakers like John Singleton and Spike Lee who helped amplify their careers, but white Hollywood as well. The latter, which also (and to this day) controlled much of what we saw on screen, showed a vested interest in Black images, even if it was less interested in nurturing Black talent.
The teen horror movie boom throughout the decade was one example. Three major sequels boasted more inclusive casting, and they all came out around the same time. 1998’s “Halloween H20: 20 Years Later” featured LisaGay Hamilton, LL Cool J and Beau Billingslea. “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer” also had Brandy in a prominent role that same year.
This particular entry gave us a peek into what it’s like to be Black on a mostly white college campus and, for instance, be dismissed by sororities favoring her uninterested best friend over her. Most of those subtleties come from non-dialogue expressions Neal admits giving Hallie that are directly in conversation with her young Black audience at the time.
“Looking back at it, people say so many things because I definitely brought my Blackness to it,” Neal recalled. She thought about the one scene where Hallie and Sidney are trapped inside a car with Ghostface and the former begins frantically kicking the doors open to escape.
Right. Opportunities like Hallie allowed Neal to bring some of her humanity to a role that wasn’t written with someone like her in mind. So, Hallie telling Sidney that “stupid people go back, smart people run” when, after they flee Ghostface, Sidney wants to return to the car to see if he’s dead, points to racial tropes in the genre simply on the basis that a Black actor says it.
And with good reason. Neal had been in a steady string of hits leading up to “Scream 2,” thanks in part to her infectiously down-to-earth personality, and because she really was just that good. And to think, she began her career as a dancer in her native Memphis (and soon after in New York), before acting ever became a thought.
“I wanted to be Debbie Allen,” she said. “I was traveling the world doing musicals, music videos. I was doing everything in that moment and really enjoying learning, growing as an individual in New York. Then everyone was like, ‘You have a great personality. Why don’t you try acting?’”
“He’s like, ‘You look familiar,’” she remembered. And I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God, it’s something I’ve done [that] he’s excited about.’” He continued, “‘You’re in that commercial with Courtney B. Vance that he proposes to you in the Burger King. You trying to set our people back. How could you?’”
Really, she was just happy to be making money at all. “‘Don’t come for me,’” she recalled thinking at the time. She must have still made an impression, because Neal was called about two weeks later to audition for her first movie role in 1992’s “Malcolm X” ― Lee’s masterpiece, in which she plays a character only named “Hooker” under her IMDB credits.
“I’ll take it,” she said with a laugh, when I brought up the fact that her character never got a real name. Like every opportunity, including “Scream 2,” she made it her own. And from there, she appeared on other soon-to-be classics like “Family Matters,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “Living Single.” And soon, her next major movie “Rosewood,” directed by Singleton.
Following Neal’s move to Los Angeles, the late filmmaker became one of her best friends at the time, particularly since both came from the music video world. Choreographer Fatima Johnson, who Neal was also close with then, introduced the two. He invited her to audition for “Rosewood” and, as she put it, “The rest is history.”
She also earned a lot of media buzz, as she recalls from an old article she had recently dug up. “I think I’m clearing out my phone a lot lately,” she realized. “It said the fact that I had three movies at the box office my first year coming out, which is — I forget so much now, I’ll be honest. It was basically ‘Rosewood,’ ‘Money Talks’ and ‘Scream 2.’”
She points to contemporary Black female stars who’ve risen in prominence during the social media era, like Issa Rae, Viola Davis and Kerry Washington, who are all outspoken actor-producers. Back then, the actress said, there was no space for Black actresses like herself to use their voices in the same way.
You were, essentially, a representative of the system. “That wasn’t the cool kid thing, to brand yourself while I’m doing ‘The Hughleys’ [the hit UPN series she starred in beginning in 1998] or while I’m on a set of ‘Money Talks,’” she said. “It’s like, no one was really talking about what they could do to elevate their brands in the ’90s.”
“If you’re talking about the ’90s, I don’t even think people were open to those conversations,” Neal said. “You’ve got to be open to the conversation to make a change. And I don’t think people were even mentally thinking, ‘I can speak freely while I’m here at work.’”
And besides, the actress even now takes pride in the fact that she’s always been fiercely independent. She is the same person who earned a scholarship to a performing arts school, left Memphis, made “a lot of money” as a performer, became a globetrotter and pursued an entirely different career at age 20. (Neal recounts these facts in rapid succession.)
Neal also had the benefit of coming up at a time when there was a much more consistent output of diverse Black experiences she could look to on screen, including a thriving Black independent film scene. They were offerings that she could watch with her mom, her sisters, her friends or her man that helped affirm who she was as a Black woman and where she wanted to go.
Whatever the case, Neal found herself toward the end of the ’90s with another great opportunity: playing the killer in “Scream 2.” But an unfortunate script leak took that away. (Hallie is tragically killed by Ghostface, while she waits for Sidney to find out whether he’s still breathing in that car.)
Well, she was about to star on “The Hughleys” the next year and obviously managed to carve a career for herself, even adding ‘producer’ to her long list of credits and helping elevate the Memphis performing arts scene. She’d also earn considerable accolades as a dancer long before then. But there was something else playing the killer would have afforded her.
“Well, when you are the lead and the killer of a huge, million-dollar franchise, then you can use that leverage to the next project,” Neal said. “And that’s happened to me a couple times where I’ve either gotten close to something and didn’t get it. But that’s the nature of the beast.”
In a world where, as she pointed out, eggs cost $8, money most definitely matters. “You want to be able to say, ‘I was nominated, and I won, and this is how much money I want now and going forward.’ Or, ‘This is the way I want to be perceived and treated going forward.’ So, being the killer would have afforded me a little bit more opportunities to have those roles.”
This content was originally published here.
