Now that Daniel Day-Lewis is retiring (or so he says), Paul Thomas Anderson is in the market for a new go-to lead. And he may have found one in Girls Trip breakout star Tiffany Haddish. As Haddish explains in the same Vulture interview where she describes asking Beyonce for a selfie at a party, she and the There Will Be Blood director have been kicking around some ideas ever since he gave her a shout-out at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards. Although Anderson wasn’t there, he did pass a note addressed to Haddish to Phantom Thread co-star Lesley Manville to read aloud at the ceremony that said, “I know everyone wants to work with you now, but please, may I cut to the front of the line?” along with his actual phone number.
Haddish, ready as always, wrote his number down, and now the two are talking about working together. I’ve been talking to him on the telephone!,” she says. “I mean, he put his phone number out there, so I had to call. I’ve talked to him a few times and we’re probably gonna work together.” Specifically, they’ve been talking about the golden age of L.A.’s “Little Harlem” in the 1940s, when the Hotel Dunbar in South Central Los Angeles was the center of a thriving African-American arts and music scene.
Anderson has been fanboying about Haddish to seemingly anyone who will listen in recent months, citing her as the one actor he wants to work with that he hasn’t yet in his Reddit AMA and calling her Girls Trip performance “a fucking magic trick” in an interview with Nerdist. But with Haddish’s calendar jam-packed with several films, a TV series, and an HBO development deal in the works, it may be Anderson who has to wait for once.