Image Credit: Damon WayansDamon Wayans is famed for creating and starring in sketch-comedy show In Living Color, as well as for memorable roles in movies like Major Payne and The Last Boy Scout. But now Wayans is trying on a different hat—that of author. And the book he’s written probably isn’t what you’d expect from the envelope-pushing and ribald comedian. With his first publishing effort, Damon has crafted a novel, Red Hats (in stores today), an inspirational story about a recently widowed senior citizen woman, Alma, who rediscovers life through a special group of pals that call themselves the “Red Hats.”
The story is partly fact and partly fiction. The Red Hats certainly do exist—this writer’s sweet grandmother Lillian, as well as Damon’s mother Elvira, is in the loosely formed organization. But Alma, the woman at the center of Damon’s story is fictional and cobbled together from the actor’s own mother and friends. Here, in a Shelf Life Q&A, Wayans talks about how his unexpected book came to be, the resistance to it in the publishing industry (“How do we sell it with Damon?”), and who—Oprah? Mo’Nique?—he’d like to play the title character if the story makes it to the screen.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What inspired this for you? It seem like an interesting choice as a project for you.
DAMON WAYANS: There are a few things that really got the ball rolling on this. One of them is I was stuck as an artist. I thought, ‘What am I going to do to rediscover my love for show business?’ I made some decent money, and I was thinking about retiring, thinking, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ I got on a plane and went to Europe and wanted to find myself. I heard my whole childhood, little white kids saying, ‘I’m going to go to Europe and find myself.’
