Queen Latifah revealed at Variety’s Power of Women summit on September 23 that an open casting call is coming for her long-in-development biopic, and that capturing her four-decade career may require more than one actress. “Someone has to capture all the different sides of me, and that’s going to be a challenge,” she said. “They’re out there somewhere. It might be three people.”
The film has been in development since it was first announced in 2024 as the opening title in a planned slate of hip-hop biopics, financed by HarbourView Equity Partners. Latifah first flagged the scale of the casting challenge back in December 2025 at the Red Sea International Film Festival, telling Deadline, “This is going to be big casting… I’ve been doing this since I was 17 years old, but there was the lead-up to it, so someone has to be able to play those different parts of it.” She has also spoken about the difficulty of reconciling her own identity with the public figure she built, recalling, “I was like, there’s no way I can live up to this, this ‘Queen Latifah.’ She’s a business, she’s much bigger than who I am. I had to come to grips with that.”
For Black Hollywood, this project sits at the intersection of two things that rarely happen together at this scale: a living hip-hop icon shaping her own biopic from the inside, and a slate structure designed to tell multiple hip-hop origin stories rather than treating any single one as a rare exception. The open casting call itself also signals an entry point for actresses without major existing credits, a route that has historically been harder to come by for Black women pursuing lead film roles outside of established industry pipelines.
The project is being produced through Latifah and longtime business partner Shakim Compere’s Flavor Unit Entertainment, alongside Will Smith’s Westbrook Studios and Jesse Collins Entertainment. Latifah has said Smith plays a significant role in her story as it’s currently being written. The film is expected to trace her path from Dana Owens, a teenage rapper out of New Jersey who released her debut album All Hail the Queen in 1989, through hits like “Ladies First” and the Grammy-winning “U.N.I.T.Y.,” and into her acting career, including her lead role on Living Single, an Oscar nomination for Chicago, and five seasons starring in and executive producing CBS’s The Equalizer, which ended in 2025. Official casting guidelines and submission details have not yet been released.
With the script still being written and no title or timeline confirmed, the open call may end up telling us as much about who Hollywood sees as capable of playing an icon as it does about who ultimately gets cast.