Why DHQ Carlene Turned Down Role In Classic ‘Dancehall Queen’ Movie
The original Dancehall Queen, Carlene Smith, has revealed that she was approached to star in the 1997 Jamaican classic film Dancehall Queen but turned down the offer because, according to her, the director totally missed the mark and created a plot that poorly portrayed women.
The pioneering Dancehall dancer said she doesn’t regret turning down the leading role, in fact, she asked the producers of the movie at the time if they were “crazy” to think that she’d ever reduce herself to play such a demeaning character.
“When the movie was being done, I had a meeting with the writer and one of the directors, and when I got to the meeting and they gave me part of the script to read I said, ‘Are you crazy? I’m not playing this’,” Smith said during an interview with DJ Wiz on the Wizology Show.
Though Smith captured the attention of the Dancehall space in the ’90s for her risqué outfits and provocative dance moves, she said it was all for entertainment and love of the culture but was not a reflection of her real upbringing or lifestyle.
“Remember now, I went to school, tertiary and otherwise. I’ve never had to sleep with a man for money. My father made sure we were quite fine. As a child, he gave us a start. I owned a car at 16 years old. I’ve never lived in poverty where certain things had to be done so when I read the script I said to the guy ‘I can’t be a part of this’. The guy says, ‘What happen?’ … I said because this is degrading’.”
The Dancehall Queen movie was a story about ‘Marcia’, a single mother and street vendor who was struggling to get by even with the financial assistance from a seemingly kindhearted ‘Larry’, a gun-toting strongman with a twisted desire for Marcia’s teenage daughter, ‘Tanya’. Marcia eventually decided to take on the persona of the Mystery Lady, at a dancing competition to desperately change her situation.
For Carlene, as the real Dancehall Queen, her journey to snagging the coveted title was completely different, and so she found it difficult to play the role of ‘Marcia’.
“I’m not a movie, I am the Dancehall Queen so you can’t ask me to play [it]. These were the two main characters: the girl who is Dancehall Queen reigning has one man driving out and a next man driving in, if you remember, the character I would play,” Smith explained.
“So they’re depicting her as a whore indirectly, and the winner who is gonna win has three children, who is played by Audrey Reid, for three different men and gave one of her children to a grown-a** man and had a handcart that she was pushing. Which part of the movie do I fit in?” said the very debonair, now 48-year-old.
While many folks at the time viewed it as an opportunity to expand her career, on the contrary, Carlene knew her worth and humbly declined. “There’s nothing in that movie’s message that’s good about women, nothing! You have to have sex for money to be something? No… I just don’t speak about it so people don’t know and probably think you are jealous or were bad-minded as they would like to use. No. I was first approached but people don’t think deep.”
“A lot of people still think that’s my character from the movie because I am the original Dancehall Queen… Yes, it’s a good deal but it’s a bad image,” she added.
Carlene’s then-partner, Dancehall deejay Beenie Man who made a cameo appearance in the movie was also unhappy with the original script to portray her in such a promiscuous way. “My partner at the time was mad because he went to them not knowing I turned it down so when he came home and said, ‘Why you didn’t…’ I said, ‘You didn’t ask me’.”
In the end, she encouraged him to appear in the film, “I told him, ‘No, you do your part, that’s okay. I’m not gonna try to change you from doing what needs to be done’.”
She also noted that she wasn’t in support of the movie’s storyline, which pitted Dancehall women against each other because that was far from what the real Dancehall Queen competitions were about.
New Dancehall Queen Competition
In fact, Carlene, who was the mastermind of the original Dancehall Queen Competition in 1992 at just 18 years old, told DJ Wiz that she will be recreating the contest to offer something more to girls who wish to enter.
The original version was conceptualized as a ‘fashion clash”, Dancehall vs. Uptown, with Carlene as the frontrunner for the Dancehall (downtown) group against a set of actual beauty queens and models from uptown. As the competition’s first-ever winner, Smith created the title “Dancehall Queen” which would go on to inspire the dancing contest in the years that followed and into a pop culture phenomenon.
“I am coming with my own Dancehall Queen Competition so be ready for that,” she said. “It will be a totally different way where the girls won’t just be a winner for the night. I’m giving them the opportunity now to be a queen, not to say they’re not before… I’ll make sure there are some jobs there when (you are crowned) the night. As with every other beauty contest in the world, you reign for the year, not for the night… You will just have more out of your title,” she said.
Carlene said the production of shows that came after wasn’t exactly how she would have envisioned them. “It’s not all that I would want but it’s okay,” she said. “It’s my baby that I gave birth to and I’ve watched it grow till now it’s out in the universe on its own so it’s something I’m very proud of.”
Though she was never officially a part of those productions, she did, however, offer her full endorsement but vowed never to appear on stage to hand over her title because she will always be the one and only Dancehall Queen.
Reflecting on her legacy and the cultural movement she pioneered, Smith is proud of her contribution and considers herself a forging member of the Dancehall culture among icons such as Bob Marley and King Yellowman.