Taraji P Henson: 'I'm glad I kept my ego in check'

After years of bit parts, low pay and a breakthrough role in Empire, Taraji P Henson is taking the lead as a Nasa scientist

Some of the impact of Hidden Figures, a movie in which Taraji P Henson stars as Katherine Johnson, a brilliant mathematician and one of the few African American women at Nasa during the early part of the space programme, comes from the assumption of progress. The film opens in the 1950s, with Johnson being harassed by a white cop when her car breaks down on the way to work, and closes with footage of President Obama giving the now 98-year-old the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The implication is clear: just look how far we've come.

Today, Henson is in a New York hotel room, shimmering with exhaustion and the thrill, after years of playing second and third fiddle in movies, of assuming a starring role. If you know her, it's probably from Empire, the hit TV show in which she plays Cookie Lyon, a fiercely ambitious hip-hop impresario and a woman who, Henson says with some understatement, "if you say something wrong to, is going to come back and have her rebuttal". If you don't know her, you may still recognise Henson's face from years of spadework on shows such as CSI, Boston Legal and ER. In 2009, she won an Oscar nomination for her supporting role as Queenie in The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, a movie for which she was paid a fraction of the salary of her more famous co-stars, and for years that is how it went: small parts, bad pay - at least relative to the Hollywood average - and the scramble for too few roles in which an African American woman might be cast. Meanwhile, Henson learned to bite her tongue and pick her battles. "What am I going to do?" she says. "Am I going to complain, or am I going to do something about it?"