Queen Latifah had a 'no death' clause put into her contract because of movie experience
Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV
Anish Vij
Featured Image Credit: CBS / 20th Century Fox
Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV
No one - including Queen Latifah - likes to see Queen Latifah die on-screen.
The legendary actor/singer/rapper/producer has been killing it ever since her 1989 debut album, All Hail the Queen.
After making her first major on-screen appearance on sitcom Living Single in 1993, her talent was there for all to see and she has since gone on to have a pretty impressive category of films to her name.
And since 2021, Latifah has been the lead role on CBS' revival of action drama The Equalizer.
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However, in her earlier work, Latifah would very often die in her movies, such as in 1996's Set It Off, as well as in 1998's Sphere, and 1999's The Bone Collector.
And because of this, she has one rule when it comes to her future projects - not dying on-screen.
The so-called 'no death clause' means that her character can’t die in the story - and you can kind of understand why.
On a 2022 appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, the musician said: “You know, what happened at the beginning of my career … my characters died in the movies and apparently I died my a** off.
“I was like, ‘Wait a minute, if I keep dying in these movies, I can’t do a sequel'.”
She then told her team: “Yo, we got to put a no death clause in my contracts.”
“Henceforth, we kind of threw it in there,” she added, calling it a 'little off the cuff funniness'.
“I was like, ‘No more dying. No more getting shot up by 300 bullets in this car'.”
She told E! Online in 2022 that it became a 'running joke' how frequently her characters were axed off.
"No, I noticed I was too good at it, so it's kind of a running joke." the Chicago star said.
I imagine Sean Bean could probably relate to that.
And speaking of unique contracts, Tom Cruise reportedly has a very unusual clause which forbids his likeness from being used to make any merchandise.
This basically means that Cruise's face, on toys and video games, is completely off the table.
In 2006, for both Mission: Impossible III and War of the Worlds PlayStation games, his exact face was not projected on screen.
And for the 2002 Minority Report game, the main character had a blonde head of short hair, rather than Cruise's distinctive brunette shaggy hair-do.
Despite there being some merch floating about, it has been confirmed that none of these have been officially licensed by either Cruise or the production company.
Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson has also joined Cruise in the odd contract clause department after requiring that his character in the Fast and Furious franchise didn't lose fights to co-stars Vin Diesel and Jason Statham in action scenes, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The more you know.