13 Black Celebs Who Had To Change Something About Themselves To “Make It” In Hollywood
A rapper felt pressured to get a bunch of cosmetic work done so she could “be successful without the help of a man.”
The entertainment industry tends to push very Eurocentric standards, pressuring performers who don’t “fit” to change something fundamental about themselves. It’s not just something that happened back in the day — many Black singers, models, and actors across generations have heard the same “advice” from industry pros.
Here are 13 Black celebs who were pressured to change something about themselves to “make it” in Hollywood:
1. When Christina Milian first started working as a child actor, she auditioned under her legal name, Christina Flores. However, she didn’t start booking roles until she took on her mom’s last name. She told the podcast Richer Lives by SoFi, “It was absolutely a business decision. I am Afro-Latina. I’m Afro-Cuban, which is not really translated all the time, especially in the early phases of my career. You know, you didn’t see as many of our faces on TV, especially a Black Latina. And so, a lot of auditions I would go in for, I would try to go in as a Latina, but my skin color didn’t really match the last name to what was appealing at the time, so I really couldn’t go in for Latina roles. And then, when they was going for an African American role, they’re like, ‘Flores? Oh, she’s Hispanic. She can’t even come to this audition.'”
She continued, “So, a friend of ours, she had changed her last name, and it really worked out for her. She’s like, ‘You should change your last name.’ So, we sat; we came up with all these names. And then one day, I don’t even know why we didn’t think of it, but my mom’s last name is Milian. … Same picture, same headshot, changed the last name to Milian, and do you know, overnight… We sent it to the same casting directors, changed everything. I booked TV shows immediately. Just that one small, little change, that pivot, actually changed the trajectory of my whole career, just by changing my last name.”
2. At the start of his acting career, Mahershala Ali was credited as Mahershalalhashbaz Ali, which is his real name. While his managers and agents never advised him to alter his name, he considered it. He ultimately decided to shorten his first name after learning that, otherwise, his name wouldn’t fit on the Place Beyond the Pines poster.
He told Vanity Fair, “I wanted to take on my full name, which was sort of a crazy thing to do considering that we’re in Hollywood … I think if you have any desire to be a leading man or to really carry some of these stories, there’s this relationship that has to be cultivated with an audience. People have to be able to say your name. I didn’t want a couple of syllables to get in the way of me having the fullest experience as an actor.”
3. Patti LaBelle told the Breakfast Club that she didn’t think she’d have career longevity because of her nose. She said, “I had an issue also with my being a Black woman with a big nose. And a friend of mine got her nose done, and I said, ‘Oh, I think I need to try that. Maybe I’ll get more gigs.’ I tried it. I did. I have a new nose. … I think it did [change things]. Because it was more pleasant [to] some people.”
Cruel comments about her appearance influenced her decision. She said, “It was a manager that I had back in the day, a white gentleman. And he said so many things to me, but whenever I sang, he said, ‘My God.’ I said, ‘Is it all right if I keep this nose?’ You know, things like that to him. He was just mean. … I just said, ‘I’ll do it’ once I saw [Stephanie Mills].”
4. In the same Breakfast Club interview, Stephanie Mills clarified that she was Patti’s friend who got a nose job. She said, “I had my nose done in the early ’80s, and I went to her house for dinner. And she said, ‘What did you do?’ I said, ‘I got my nose done!’ And she was like, ‘I’mma get one.'”
Stephanie decided to get her nose job after Michael Jackson got his, and she went to the same doctor as he did. She said, “I [got a nose job] and then [Patti] did… All of them do it. You know, all of the girls do it.”
5. In the ’90s, Halle Berry was known for her iconic pixie cut, but she chose the style after several bad experiences with hairstylists on set who didn’t know how to work with Black hair. She told AP, “That’s why I had short hair. [Maintaining] it was easy. I think as people of color, especially in the business, we haven’t always had people that know how to manage our hair. Those days are different now [than] when I started.”
6. Similarly, Gabourey Sidibe has to advocate for her characters to wear protective styles. She tweeted, “If they don’t have the budget to hire a black hairstylist for me, or won’t, I just get the director to agree that my character should have box braids or senegalese twist.”
7. Former child star Raven-Symoné told Entertainment Tonight, “My likeness, whether you see it in an interview, whether you see it in print, however you see it, at that time, had 15 people dictating what I should and should not look like. If I did whatever I want, I’m not gonna sell, ’cause it doesn’t go with the brand. I was branded at such a young age, and then you wonder why all these child stars have these issues. You were not allowing them to grow up as human beings. You were stifling them at the youngest and most important development age of their time, and then you expect them to be normal later? In my head, I have three different brains. At that age, you had to compartmentalize. When you’re in the public eye, you have to.”
And in the 2015 OWN documentary Light Girls, she said, “When I had my own show, I used to tan three or four times a week in a tanning bed to get darker. It’s funny, one of the lighting guys came up — I love him to death — he goes, ‘Raven, I need you to stop tanning. You’re getting too dark, and we have to relight the whole entire show.’ I was like, ‘Sorry, I was just trying to be pretty!'”
8. Early in Sheryl Lee Ralph’s career, a Black makeup artist advised her to always bring her own makeup on set (which is something many Black actors still have to do). She told the Hollywood Reporter, “I was very young, and it might have been on Falcon Crest. There was one Black makeup artist, and he gave me a complete professional makeup kit, the kind that they use in the union. He said, ‘Honey, make sure you take this with you on every job.’ I still have that case.”
She also continues to bring her own wigs to set. She said, “It took me one time for them to burn my hair because they couldn’t get it straight. I said, ‘Never again.’ So I’m always prepared. I usually go into work done up. If you’re No. 1 or 2 on that call sheet, you have some say in who’s coming into the department. But if you are 3 or 4, you’d better come prepared. That’s why you bring an arsenal of wigs, because most times, they can handle the wigs. And most times, you incur that cost. I cannot believe that at this point in my career, this is still happening with such regularity, and it bothers me. What it says to me is, my needs are not important enough to be taken seriously.”
9. Nathalie Emmanuel told W magazine, “There was one time when I was on a show where there was another girl who had curly hair. She was a Black woman too, and we looked absolutely nothing alike, but they were like, ‘We need you to straighten your hair because people have to be able to tell you two apart.’ And that was so disappointing. I think at the time, I justified it by telling myself, ‘It’s a different look, and you haven’t really done that before. It might be fun to just have this other look, and this is just part of the character.’ But in hindsight, my hair was absolutely destroyed from straightening it every day for that job.”
“Now, if people want to straighten my hair or they want me to have a straight-hair look — that’s fine if it’s right for the character that I’m playing, and I agree that it’s right for the character — but they’re going to have to put a wig on me. Nothing is destroying this glorious thing that I’ve grown out of my head that my mother gave to me,” she said.
10. Jason Derulo’s last name is actually Desrouleaux, which is pronounced the same way as his shortened stage name. He decided to change it professionally so that it wouldn’t be misspelled or mispronounced.
11. As an up-and-coming artist, K. Michelle got illegal silicone butt injections, thinking it would help her career. She told Essence, “I had just got a new record deal, and I felt like the bigger the butt, the bigger the career. I already had a big butt. It was just ridiculous.”
She later had to have four surgeries and two blood transfusions to remove them. In 2018, she told People, “[The injector] wasn’t a doctor — it was black market, it was these ‘hydrogel’ injections — that’s what they were being called. When I found out my favorite rapper did it, that’s when I decided, ‘I’m getting it done.'”
12. When Angëër Amol signed with her modeling agency, she was asked to cut her hair. In a TikTok interview with actor/model Nick Joesten, she said, “I told them this, and I was like, ‘Every dark skin model has to have short hair, and I don’t want to do that.’ I think it’s just, to me in that moment, was, they don’t wanna deal with the fact that they have to style it or have to deal with how to come up with styles.”
She also told Essence, “When I first came into the industry, I had locs. When I signed to my agency, they told me I needed to cut my hair. I wasn’t comfortable with it — it took me five years to grow out my locs. … When I told my agents I was going to cut my hair, they were fine with it because they’d wanted me to anyway. But they didn’t expect me to cut it as short as I did. I shaved it all the way down — and I didn’t book a single job for over a year and a half.”
13. And finally, as a rapper, Jessica Dime felt like she needed to get cosmetic work — including butt filler, liposuction, a breast augmentation, and lip filler— done in order to have a successful career. On Botched Presents: Plastic Surgery Rewind, she said, “I feel like getting into the industry definitely played a part in me wanting to look the way I look. But definitely, stuff pressures you into doing it, when you feel like, ‘Look, I gotta do this so I can be successful without the help of a man.'”
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