Prior to her success in the critically-acclaimed film Precious and long before her days of working with Lucious Lyon as Becky on Empire, Gabourey Sidibe had a very interesting career as a phone sex operator.
The actress opened up to People about her previous job.
“I was actually pretty good at it,” Sidibe said of the gig she had for three years. “I did it for two months before I was promoted.”
She explained how being a phone sex operator helped her in terms of her acting, but she didn't want to tell everyone about that training.
“I knew that when people were asking me, ‘So have you had any acting training?’ my acting school was on the phone, pretending to be some super young 21-year-old college girl named Melody. I know that was my acting! But I felt too stupid to say it.”
Sidibe hasn't worked for the phone sex company in several years, but during a recent photo shoot for her new book, This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare, she found herself right back in the same building she worked out of.
“The last photo shoot for my book was in the same office building that I did phone sex for three years in!” she said. “It’s so crazy! My editor came in, and I was like, ‘You’re not going to f**king believe it: We’re on the third floor, but the office was on the tenth floor!’ So we went to the tenth floor to see how it changed. The place went out of business the second I wasn’t there anymore. It was so weird; all of my senses came alive. I could smell the HR room, the coffee over there … The last thing I did for the book was go right back to where I was a f**king phone hoe!”
The 33-year-old also spoke about politics and the need to put a stop to rape culture and the "boys will be boys" talk.
"That’s low-key rape culture and that doesn’t work anymore,” she stated. “We need to make boys responsible for that s**t. Instead, what we do is say, ‘Boys will be boys,’ and that’s not OK."
Sidibe's memoir will be available for purchase this May.