Ever since Terrence Howard started talking, he’s been labeled different in Hollywood. Some called him “difficult” and others labeled him as “hot tempered.” With rumors, stories and quotes from a Rolling Stone interview, it seems like his views on masculinity in Hollywood had people talking again.
Perhaps it all started when he was born. At birth, Howard says his skin was so yellow that doctors at the hospital thought he had jaundice and whisked him away to a darkened room for three days. “No contact with Mom,” he says. “Inside an incubator inside a dark room. Those were the first three days of my life.”
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Growing up into an adult, at one time, he was going to be a big movie star, having built an impressive resume’ of films like Crash (2005) and Hustle & Flow (2005). He began building up his bank account with movies like Iron Man (2008), for which he was paid $3.5 million, more than any other member of the cast, including star Robert Downey Jr. But word started to leak out about Howard being difficult on set; as well as women began speaking up about his temper. He soon found himself reduced to $40,000 a movie. “When all that stuff went down about me, you’re not in any bargaining position,” he says. “You’re shunned. You’re persona non grata.”
Maybe it comes from his dad.
“My daddy taught me, ‘Never take the vertebrae out of your back or the bass out of your throat,” explains Howard. “I ain’t raisin’ sheep. I raised men. Stay a man.’ But being a man comes with a curse because it’s not a society made for men to flourish anymore. Everything is androgynous, you know? The more successful men now are the effeminate.”
“The problem with this business,” he says, “you lose yourself.”
Another problem Howard has is his temper. He’s been escorted off a plane for unruly behavior. He’s punched out strangers in a restaurant. He’s been rumored to have knocked at least two of his women around, most recently ex-wife Michelle Ghent, who after a 2013 trip to Costa Rica with Howard was photographed with a black eye. She said Howard did it.
Then there was also that time in 2001 when he was arrested for hitting his first wife (married 1989, divorced 2003; remarried in 2005, divorced again in 2007), which led to a guilty plea for disorderly conduct. According to the police report, he had “punched her twice with a closed fist.”
About that one, he explains, “She was talking to me real strong, and I lost my mind and slapped her in front of the kids,” he says. “Her lawyer said it was a closed fist, but even slapping her was wrong.”
Speaking about the Costa Rica incident: “She was trying to mace me,” he says, “and you can’t see anything so all you can do is try to bat somebody away, and I think that something caught her. But I wasn’t trying to hit her.”
Howard recounts the time when his father took him to see Santa Clause at a department store. The pair was standing in line when his father stabbed a man with…
… a nail file. The actor was only 2 years old at the time, but he was able to remember the details like it happened early that very day.
“I was standing next to my father, watching,” he shared. “Then stuff happened so quickly— blood was on the coats, on our jackets— and then my dad’s on a table and then my dad is gone to prison.”
His father was convicted of manslaughter and served 11 months in prison. Howard said that when his father returned, he was a tougher man then before he went in.
No matter what people say about Terrence or his father, it doesn’t bother him.
“The people that judge you don’t matter. They’re not real. Everything is just frequencies.”
But there’s another side to Terrance that many don’t see in the media. In 2013, he got married again, to an L.A. restaurateur named Mira Pak, and the two would spend up to 17 hours a day cutting shapes out of the plastic and joining them together into various objects meant to demonstrate his theories. Which turned into Howard creating and owning U.S. patent 20150079872 A1 (“Systems and methods for enhanced building-block applications”), among others.
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