Queen Latifah is fighting for justice in her new series, The Equalizer.
The Oscar-nominated actress plays Robyn McCall, a single mother with a mysterious background who uses her skills to help those with nowhere else to turn. Her character acts as a guardian angel and a defender for those who can’t seem to find justice for themselves.
“She‘s a leader. She knows how to delegate,” Latifah says about her character. “She’s very skillful at many things, but I think what’s most important to her right now is that she’s done with the greed, she’s done with the uber-powerful. She is all about taking what she has learned through the years, what she’s mastered deftly, and [using it] for the 99 percent of the population who don’t have access to people like her, and that’s what drives her at this point.”
She continues, “What makes her lose sleep is the people she can’t save. And I think we‘re in a time when that’s what makes a lot of people lose sleep. The people [who] can’t get a break, that’s who she wants to fight for. That’s who she wants to Equalize for.”
The Co-Creator/Executive Producer of the series, Terri Edda Miller, added her own analysis of Latifah’s character, saying, “part of her superpower is her soul and it‘s her determination to help the people who need her help.”
“But, she’s a living, breathing woman,” Miller continues. “She is not impenetrable or impermeable. She bleeds. She feels. And that’s one of the things that’s really special about our Equalizer, is that she is very grounded in reality.”
While this series is fiction, Latifah goes on to speak about how the show mirrors current society.
“Who in their mind could even fathom that the world would turn into what it turned into over the last year?” the star asked. “But it seems to be perfect timing for this show, for us to be able to tell these stories, stories ripped from the headlines that we intended to have ripped from the headlines then that are really ripped from the headlines now and so timely now.”
The Equalizer premieres on Sunday, February 7th, after the Super Bowl.
