Mary (Taraji P. Henson) is a hit woman working for an organised crime family in Boston, whose life is completely turned around when she crosses paths with a young boy while doing a job.

Producer Paul Schiff had been working to get Proud Mary to the big screen for many years. “The characters are rich and nuanced – this is not a cookie-cutter action movie,” he says. The story begins as Mary finalises an assignment. “She assumes that she’s done for the day, but Mary suddenly realises that a 12-year-old boy is also in the apartment. Because he is sitting in his room with headphones on oblivious to her presence and the killing, she sneaks out of the apartment, but she is deeply affected by seeing that young boy. It’s an act that changes her completely.

“We next meet Mary a year later at the moment she intervenes in this young boy’s now terribly troubled life and she literally picks him up off the street unconscious,” continues Schiff. “We soon realise that she’s been keeping the boy, Danny, under surveillance that whole year – and the relationship that shapes our story begins.”

Henson opines that, “the basic story is about what do humans do when we’re forced to make a change in life and to make the decision to better our lives”. When we first meet her, she is a cold, brilliant professional, a complicated, hardened criminal.

The characters are rich and nuanced – this is not a cookie-cutter action movie

“Like Danny, Mary was forced by circumstances to take on this life,” adds Schiff. “As a child she’d been picked up off the street and trained to kill. The only love that she has ever really known is from this dark, criminal family that cared for her in return for her services as an assassin – and as she gets older that perverse relationship continues.”

Henson adds: “This is a person absolutely numb to life, to love, who is finally awakened. We’re so quick as humans to write people off. Oh, that person’s bad, after they did one thing. Well, with Mary, you can’t say one thing.

“But there was this part of life to which she was blind. It’s rough out here and, sometimes, we don’t make right choices because of our circumstances, the cards we were dealt. Here we have a human just trying to make the best of a bad situation and you’ve got to give her credit for that. You see a killer become a human. Blood starts to pump through her veins – that’s what you see in Mary. You’re watching that transformation, which is what really intrigued me.”

Mary is clearly one who lives in a violent and brutal world, and Henson stresses that she doesn’t ever want to glorify killing people. “Babak, our director, was very clear about being careful with the images that we are portraying because whenever you play a character that picks up a gun, you’re playing God, right?” she says, “And I take that very seriously. So we took great care in how we portrayed these characters.”

Henson has been on a roll lately, taking on roles as diverse as the brilliant stalwart Katherine Johnson in the Oscar-nominated Hidden Figures and Cookie Lyon on TV hit Empire. The actress grabbed the chance to play Mary because she avoids repeating characters. She has played a sniper, cops and detectives, but had never tackled a role like this – a hired assassin.

“She’s not ex-military or a street thug,” she asserts. “In an elevator she might be all: ‘Hi, how are you? Those are nice shoes. Have a great day’. Then, five steps out the building it’s pop, pop,” she laughs. “It’s fun and it’s very different because people always see me as nurturing and natural. This woman knows nothing about mothering – and here she ends up with this kid!”

The movie also stars Jahi Di’Allo Winston as Danny, the streetwise kid unaware of what prompts Mary to come to his aid; Danny Glover is Benny, Mary’s fatherly but brutally unforgiving boss, while Billy Brown is his son Tom, with whom Mary was once romantically involved. 

Margaret Avery is Benny’s wise and refined wife; and Xander Berkeley is the drug-dealing sadist Mary eradicates, provoking an all-out turf war.

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