why is nia long in the media spotlight?”
It’s supposed to be her day off, but Nia Long — sultry seductress on the big screen (Alfie), do-good cop on TV (Third Watch), full-time mom in real life — can’t come out today. There’s her 3-year-old son, Massai, who must be taken to preschool and later bathed, fed, and lulled to sleep. There’s the unplanned visit to the Brooklyn set of her NBC crime drama. There’s some serious tidying up to do because, the 34-year-old sighs, ”I am neurotic about a clean house. I can’t even go on an audition if my apartment is dirty — I’ll be thinking about the five loads of laundry that I need to do!” And if there’s time, she may get to squeeze in a pedicure. ”I work really well under pressure,” Long makes clear during a late-evening phone call from her TriBeCa home. And right now, she couldn’t be happier. But five years ago, Long had reached a crossroads. ”I didn’t feel I was growing as an artist,” she admits. ”I was the It Girl. If there was a black girl in an urban film, that was my job. . .
When Chris Rock’s daughter came home from school asking why she doesn’t have “good hair,” the question set him on a worldwide quest to track down the answer. In his latest project, titled Good Hair, opening in Atlanta Fri., Oct. 9, Rock reveals the origins of the notion of refined hair for blacks and the lengths to which black women, and sometimes men, will go to acquire it. Here, Rock and co-star Nia Long discuss the Good, the bad and the funny. How do you think growing up in Bed-Stuy impacted your comedic sensibility growing up? Chris Rock: New York is a funny place — I can only compare it to L.A. … It’s not a funny place. Everybody wants to be in show business in L.A., no matter what — everything revolves around show business. Where in New York, you can go to a good party given by the corrections officers. Your wife, Malaak, who runs an organization that helps empower women to transition back into the workplace, was missing from the film’s conversation. Why is that? I have a policy
