Tiffany Haddish

Tiffany Sara Cornilia Haddish was born in Los Angeles in 1979 and is a stand-up comedian first, an actress second, and an author as well. The screen career built slowly: a bit part in Meet the Spartans (2008), then a run of guest work, then Jackie on the OWN drama If Loving You Is Wrong from 2014, Nekeisha on NBC's The Carmichael Show from 2015 to 2017, and Hi-C in the comedy Keanu (2016).

Girls Trip (2017) changed everything, and the reason is worth stating precisely. As Dina she plays appetite. She commits to a bit several beats past the point where a more careful performer would protect themselves, so a scene that another actor would land she instead detonates, and the film simply reorganises itself around her. The New Yorker later put the performance on its list of the best of the century. Time named her one of its hundred most influential people in 2018, The Hollywood Reporter listed her among the hundred most powerful people in entertainment in 2018 and 2019, and she has won a Primetime Emmy for guest actress in a comedy series.

What followed was the standard post-breakout deal, which is to say a great deal of family animation. She voices Queen Watevra Wa'Nabi in The Lego Movie 2, Daisy in The Secret Life of Pets 2, Debbie in The Angry Birds Movie 2, plus SpongeBob and Phineas and Ferb features, and she anchors studio comedies from Night School to Haunted Mansion to Bad Boys: Ride or Die. The more interesting thread runs alongside it: La Linda in The Card Counter and Ruby O'Carroll in The Kitchen are both quiet, watchful and deliberately unfunny, and both suggest a dramatic career she has not fully taken up.