Tyler Perry’s newest film Divorce in the Black arrived on Prime Video Thursday, July 11 and is currently a hot topic on social media.

The film stars Meagan Good as Ava, a banking professional whose life hits a speed bump when her husband asks for her divorce. Ava is the “but I’mma stick beside him” type but when her friends and family push her to see how Dallas, played by Cory Hardrict, isn’t worth fighting for, Ava begins to accept that her marriage is over and rebuild herself stronger than ever before. Of course that’s when Dallas ups the ante on his bad behavior.

Our Sr. Content Director Janeé Bolden sat down with Meagan Good and Cory Hardrict ahead of the film’s release to discuss their longtime friendship, working with Tyler Perry and more.

In addition to Good and Hardrict, the film also stars Richard Lawson, Debbi Morgan, Taylor Polidore, Shannon Wallace and Joseph Lee Anderson as Ava’s supportive family and friends.

“There’s many things I love about Tyler Perry, but one of the things that he wrote in the script is just having that strong support system, with her father, with her mother, with her best friend, having that covering — people who will tell you the truth even when you’re not ready to hear it, and just that unconditional love, loving you no matter what, walking through it with you and by you — that’s invaluable when you have,” Good told BOSSIP.

Dallas, who is drunk and disruptive throughout the film comes from a family of miscreants that mirror or encourage his bad behavior.

“I would say my family was my support system, even though I was wrong, they supported it,” Hardrict told BOSSIP of his onscreen family. “And you know what? That’s real life. You know how your family,when you do something wrong they still like, ‘That’s my bae, I’m still riding!’ That’s how my family was. The families had different dynamics but they loved each person and that’s part of real life.”

While we hope Dallas’ reality doesn’t hit too close to home for audiences — we knew from the time we saw the first trailer that Good and Hardrict, who each recently endured divorces (Good split from producer/pastor DeVon Franklin in 2021 after nine years of marriage, while Hardrict and wife of 15 years, actress Tia Mowry divorced in 2023) could likely relate to their characters divorce experience. Dallas and Ava are from a small town where news spreads like rapidfire, and the onscreen effect in the film resembles the fishbowl of celebrity personal drama.

“Welcome to Hollywood!” Good agreed. “With Ava, the biggest thing that I related to was obviously the divorce, and the family as well, because my family has been absolutely incredible and so supportive and walked me through it, but just dealing with the fact that she’s getting a divorce, that she thought her life was gonna go one way and then all of a sudden it’s going completely different, and then having to get to a place of getting excited about what’s next in her life and kind of really hoping you know for just everything that she wants even though it’s different than what she thought it would look like.”

“When I read the script, I would have done the movie regardless of my personal life situation because it was all on the page and it was a great film,” Hardrict said. “It was a great characters, for the culture, that people needed to see. I’m an actor. I know how to turn it on when the cameras come on. I’m an artist, this is what I do and I enjoy doing it. I pulled 30 years of experience into this movie, passion, emotion, vulnerability everything excitement and I was ready to go shout to Mr. Perry for hiring us.”

Public opinion has long been divided on the subject of Tyler Perry — and his works. Even just 24 hours after the release of Divorce in the Black the film has been hit with heavy criticism. Both Good and Hardrict said they came into the experience with Perry knowing the production wouldn’t be easy.

“I knew it was going to be a challenge in a good way you know which I was really excited about,” Good told BOSSIP. “He [Perry] challenged me to approach things differently in some scenes than I would, I think the one scene in the trailer when he shows up at the house, I had a certain approach and Tyler kept saying, ‘Just try this, try this, try this…’ Once I finally saw it, ‘Ohh there it is, there it is, there it is!’ When I saw it, I was really, really happy with the scene because it’s something different for me. I think sometimes when you grow up in the business you have a certain mentality about some things. Every character is completely different, but this challenged me. Tyler challenged me to think about it in a completely different way that I hadn’t thought of and I thought that it really, really served the scene and the characters. I was very, very happy.”

“What I love about Mr. Perry is he lets you find it,” Hardrict told BOSSIP. ” He lets you move off your instincts, but you move so fast. In other productions, most of the time you have downtime,  you sit down, you can sit in the scene and do your study and rehearsal, but here you were just moving. I think that gives you that survival instinct where you can also pull out your best work because you’re moving.  It’s like that guerilla filmmaking, even though this is not guerilla.  It put me in that, where I started from.  You just gotta move.  You gotta be on your toes. I love everything about this.  I would love to continue working in this way of doing scenes.  It was a great time. I had a good time I had fun.

While Ava and Dallas don’t have the healthiest relationship, Hardrict said he and Good have a familial friendship that extends back decades. He even credits Good for helping him land the role of Dallas.

“It’s been amazing working with Megan,” Hardrict told BOSSIP. “We’ve worked together 20 years ago and Megan has always been someone who’s been a professional, who’s been kind, who had a great family, so to work with her in this, we had some chemistry but to work on this was even better because I know this person, I know her heart. She gave Tyler a little bump like, ‘You know Cory Hardrict?’  I’m very grateful for Megan for doing that — allowing Tyler to hire me and I didn’t take that lightly. So I wanted to do good for Tyler for Megan. My name is on the line and I’m a professional when I step on stage.  It’s go time!”

Divorce in the Black is streaming on Prime Video now.

Listen: We have seen our share of stories about “educators” who, honestly, have no business whatsoever teaching children, especially Black children.

We’ve seen teachers get sued, fired or disciplined for bullying Black students and unabashedly using the n-word. We’ve seen education officials come under fire for lying about Black history and disparaging Black students in recorded discussions. We’ve even seen a teacher declare with his whole chest that white people represent the “superior” race, despite losing the leg-washing Olympics every year and having Donald Trump, Kid Rock and Roseanne as members of their demographic. But there are certain cases where it’s not even the racism displayed by these so-called “educators” that stands out the most—it’s the audacity. 

Meet Alex Nguyen, an “educator” in biology at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California.

According to the Sacramento Bee, Nguyen, for whatever inconceivable reason, thought it would be appropriate to include students’ actual names in test questions included in his class’s biology final, which mentioned less than flattering physical attributes of said students. Not only that, but one question in particular that mentioned a Black student by name was explicitly racist AF, which could lead one to wonder if this “educator” was actively trying to lose his job. This man really included a question that insisted there exists “a gene for the pimp walk, which is dominant” in Black people.

From the Bee:

“In high school, there are individuals who are cross-eyed like (the name of a fellow student) and (the name of the student previously mentioned), which is a dominant trait. We call those individuals ‘weirdoes’. So, if you crossed two weirdoes (the two students named again), that are heterozygous for being cross-eyed, what is the offspring that would result?”

Many students in the class were targeted by first and last name on the exam. Teacher Alex Nguyen chose to describe these students by their ethnicities and physical features, and then paired them up, posing questions about what traits a theoretical child of these two students would have. On one question, the teacher wrote a disclaimer, saying “in no way do I promote students being sexually active,” but the student’s parents and other teachers at the school said that the implication of any sexual relationship between students is inappropriate.

The student, whose parents requested The Sacramento Bee not name him, is half-Black and half-Mexican. He shrugged off the question where he was disparaged, but another question shocked him for its racist overtones against African American students at Luther Burbank.

The question starts by discussing the high school’s diversity and noting that so-called African American traits have infiltrated students of other races.

“For some reason, the African American culture has influenced most of the student body. How? In African Americans, they have a gene for the pimp walk, which is dominant. What is the result if you cross (student name) homozygous dominant Latina with a homozygous recessive Hmong like (student name)?”

First of all, “the African American culture has influenced” most of the world, and certainly most aspects of American pop culture, not just “the student body” at Luther Burbank. It’s not this way “for some reason,” it’s because Black people are so dope we can’t dance, make music or create slang/vernacular without being imitated on a global scale (which still does nothing to dissuade society from disparaging us as “ghetto” and “rachet” when we start these trends just be being Black in public).

Nguyen’s dismissive attitude regarding the influence of Black American culture aside, it’s very telling that the one attribute associated with Black people that he chose to include in his ridiculous test is the swagger in our walk, which he described as a “pimp walk,” likely because he doesn’t know many Black people outside of his classroom, but he is very much familiar with anti-Black stereotypes. (It’s also worth mentioning that, according to the Bee, the student body at Luther Burbank is 97% non-white.)

Nguyen has been accused by students and parents of using his test to target students he has had problems with in the past. For example, one question targeted two students who previously had gotten in trouble for sleeping in class.

“Here at the wonderful school of LBHS, we have certain students who love to sleep in class,” the test question read. “I even see students fall asleep during exams! Can you believe that?! I don’t like it when students sleep in class… it’s rude! So, WAKE THE #$%K UP! Well, through much study, I have concluded that the gene for falling asleep is dominant. Not only that some students sleep, they snore in class. This too is a dominant trait. What are the possible offspring if you cross a homozygous sleeping, heterozygous snoring student (student name) with a homozygous attentive, non-snoring (student name) student?”

District spokesperson Al Goldberg said in a statement that the administration was not initially aware that the test, which Nguyen reportedly defiantly put up on a projector after Principal Jim Peterson pulled the physical exams from students due to how obviously offensive they were. (Again, this man must have been trying to get fired.) Goldberg said Nguyen is currently on administrative leave while his behavior is under an ongoing investigation.

Please, at the very least, fire this man, and keep Black children and children of color as far away from him and his “education” as humanly possible.

An OWN show centered around a melanin-excellence embodying family is airing a new episode, and BOSSIP’s got an exclusive clip.

As BOSSIP exclusively reported, Family Empire: Houston, a new series about the multi-generational Braden family of Houston, Texas, premiered Friday, June 28 at 8 pm ET/PT.

The 8-episode unscripted series follows the Bradens across four generations of Black excellence that “explores complex themes of generational wealth and the building of a family legacy.”

In particular, the show produced by Carlos King’s Kingdom Reign Entertainment stars “sister cousins” Nicole, Jermeshia, and JaQuita who have a collective dream to follow in the footsteps of their beloved grandmother and the Braden family matriarch, Oscarene, a real estate entrepreneur who built the family empire from the ground up and “passed down this grit and determination to her children and grandchildren.”

These inspiring realtors who make up the largest independently Black-owned brokerage in H-Town told BOSSIP that they’re excited to showcase their booming metro housing market while giving viewers an inside look at their family.

The premiere season will feature them confronting skeletons in the closet including an estrangement, complications around Oscarene’s plan to pass down the family wealth,  single motherhood, and more. Despite the drama, the group still manages to always find a way to make amends.

Now OWN watchers are continuing to check out the Braden family’s dealings, and BOSSIP’s got your first look at the action.

Family Empire: Houston Exclusive Clip

In an exclusive clip from Friday’s new episode, we see Madam Broker Jermeshia talking to Aunt Nikki about Oscarene potentially showing favor to the “G-1s” a.k.a the first generation of the Braden family. The ladies are discussing a rental property investment for the matriarch which Jermeshia believes will serve a greater purpose.

“She wants something to sell so she can give it to the G-1s,” says the broker. How many times has she sold off her land and legacy to pay off the G-1s bills?!”

DeAngela says it’s untrue, but admits she’s been “blessed” by Oscarene.

“It was one thing they did sell, we were blessed to receive something,” she says. “Did your mom not share her blessing?”

She goes on to say that the younger Braden is out of line and notes that she and her siblings are hard workers.

Take a look below.

A new episode of Family Empire: Houston airs tomorrow Friday, July 12 at 8 on OWN.

Meagan Good isn’t giving up on marriage post-divorce.

The actress’s relationship with Jonathan Majors seemingly popped up out of nowhere, but ever since they were first linked, they’ve been seemingly inseparable. Now, Good is speaking about her desires for something a lot more serious down the line, admitting she’s looking forward to getting remarried and having kids someday.

During a recent conversation with ET about her new film, Divorce in Black, Good opened up about how working with co-star Cory Hardrict while they both navigated divorce was “therapeutic.”

“Here’s the thing, neither one of us has had bad marriages, we’re both friends with our exes and we love them, we care about them, we want the best for them and they want the best for us,” Good said of her and Hardrict’s relationships with her ex-husband, DeVon Franklin, and his ex-wife, Tia Mowry.

She continued: “But no matter what… divorce is traumatizing and tough, and I think that what I really wanted to do with [my character] Ava was create the space and say, ‘OK, this happened, but this is my second act of life and I’m going to get excited about that and I’m going to do my work and I’m going to heal, but I’m also going to rediscover myself and I’m going to remember things about myself and I’m just going to be excited for the next part of my journey.’”

Good went on to explain that Ava’s journey wasn’t “only her being the victim,” but also her choosing to take control of her life and “be incredible instead of being a victim.”

“I could definitely relate to [that part of it] because I still want to have kids and I’m still going to have kids,” she continued, calling her current journey her “second act of life.”

“And one day I would like to get remarried and all the things,” Meagan revealed. “So, you definitely think about that, I mean, I’m going to be 43 in about a month now. But I think that society often does make you feel like you pass your prime… but I’m like, ‘You know what? Nobody’s in control but God.”

DeMar DeRozan addresses his appearance in Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” music video and talks relationship with Drake.

One of the people dragged into Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s beef was former Raptors player DeMar DeRozan. Once upon a time, DeMar graced the cover of SLAM Magazine alongside Drake as they were crowned the “6 Gods”. Eventually, DeMar was traded but was recently name-dropped on “Not Like Us” with Kendrick claiming Drake “didn’t deserve him”.

On the 4th of July Kendrick unleashed the video for “Not Like Us” and DeMar DeRozan was front and center for his name drop.

According to Bleacher Report, in his first interview since his recent trade DeRozan addressed his relationship with both rappers.

“Love Drake, always can play him (in Sacramento’s Golden 1 Center),” DeRozan told Fox40’s Sean Cunningham. “Kendrick’s been a friend of mine, family. Damn near family, for a long time, for a while. We’re from the same city, we’re up down there in the same neighborhood.”

Derozan reveals Kendrick has been a close friend but their relationship isn’t for the public or to prove any points.

“It’s always been there. It hasn’t always been publicized, but that’s basically family.” said Demar.

If you’re asking him to pick sides it seems he wants no parts. However, there is a difference in the two relationships one is family and one is business. Furthermore, it seems Kendrick’s shoutout was good luck as he’s found his way back to California after joining the Sacramento Kings.

You can watch Demar break the relationships down below.