Disney Princess Wants to Kick Butt, Suck Blood

Like a lot of kids, Anika Noni Rose grew up dreaming of becoming a Disney princess. Except Rose actually got to play one: Princess Tiana, the first African-American female lead in an animated Disney movie, The Princess and the Frog. “That was the thing that I first wanted to do,” she tells Kurt Andersen. “I didn’t even think of it as acting. I just knew I wanted to be in a Disney film.”

She’s currently starring with Denzel Washington in A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s play about an African-American family in 1950s Chicago trying to make a life in a white neighborhood. Rose plays Beneatha, a young woman who dreams of going to medical school. “Lorraine Hansberry was a genius,” Rose says. “She was so far ahead of her time, and Beneatha is really an expression of Lorraine.”

She’s nominated for a Tony Award for her performance. It would be her second — she won a Tony in 2004 for her performance as the maid’s daughter in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change. Although that musical took years for Kushner to complete, Rose says she was determined to stick with it. “I’m in love with Tony Kushner. I love his brain, I love the way he sees people. And he writes amazing women.”

Rose also stars in Half of a Yellow Sun, a recent film based on the novel about the Nigerian civil war by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Her character, Kainene, manages to hold her family together. “From the rape of the Sabine women on, women are always a commodity; we are always something with which to trade. But Kainene refuses to be the pawn.”