Queen Latifah Has A Lucrative Rule For Every Movie She Makes

Queen Latifah started her music career in the late 1980s, beatboxing for the famed New York/New Jersey music collective the Flavor Unit. By 1989, she already had released her first single, "Wrath of My Madness," overseen by start producer Fab 5 Freddy. Her rap songs soon began getting a great deal of airplay, and she became a celebrity on "Yo! MTV Raps." Only a few years into her professional music career, Latifah branched out into acting, first appearing in Spike Lee's 1991 film "Jungle Fever." She was in mainstream Hollywood comedies like "House Party 2" and "Who's the Man?," while also appearing in dramas like "Juice" and "My Life." 

Latifah's star-making turn came in 1996, playing the role of Cleo in F. Gary Gray's "Set It Off," a hard-edged L.A. heist movie that also starred Jada Pinkett and Vivica A. Fox. From that point foward, she was a force to be reckoned with. Latifah has worked with Martin Scorsese, sang in musicals like "Chicago" (which earned her an Oscar nomination), and she has also voiced numerous cartoon animals. She has made dumb farces, crime movies, and numerous romances. Latifah is a powerful polymath, and she speaks at length about the importance of women in hip-hop, all between playing Ellie in the many, many "Ice Age" movies. More recently, she has starred in the TV reboot of "The Equalizer."

The fact that Latifah has appeared in so many "Ice Age" sequels (and there are so many, they're hard to keep track of) may actually a result of a contract stipulation that she dictated long ago. On a 2023 episode of "The Drew Barrymore Show" (via New York Post), Latifah revealed that she has a "no death" clause in all of her acting work. Latifah said that she started her acting career often playing characters who were killed, but that she quickly lost her taste for dying. If she wanted career longevity, Latifah reasoned, she need to survive for any potential sequels. 

Of course, having a no-death clause in her contracts does indeed alter the kinds of movies Latifah stars in. She won't take on a weepy role playing a character who has a fatal disease, nor will she play a victim in a horror movie. But emerging unscathed and able to make a sequel is more important than being a slasher for Latifah. To Barrymore, she said: 

"You know, what happened at the beginning of my career ... my characters died in the movies, and apparently I died my ass off. [...] I was like, 'Wait a minute, if I keep dying in these movies, I can't do a sequel!' [I said to my people that] 'Yo, we got to put a no-death clause in my contracts. Henceforth, we kind of threw it in there. [...] I was like, 'No more dying. No more getting shot up by 300 bullets in this car." 

To that end, Latifah has not played a doomed character once in over 20 years. That clause, sadly, ruins the ending of her 2006 comedy "Last Holiday," a movie about a woman who is given a terminal disease diagnosis and decides to spend her last few days spending all her money and living large. If audiences know Latifah can't die, then they'll know she'll live to see the end of the movie. 

Latifah noted that she even has a nickname for her contractual clause: "A Little Off-the-Cuff Funniness." She and Barrymore also, in a humorous fashion, compared her clause to anti-nudity clauses that many actors write into their contracts. Latifah was flippant. "I was like no, you can show my butt if you need to," she said. "Here's my butt, and it's live!"