CAN I GET AN AMEN? Henson hears the word of the Lord in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Taraji P. Henson loves to talk about acting. In fact, she just loves to talk. On a recent visit to Chicago to promote The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which she plays Queenie, the woman who raises Benjamin, I conducted a lively question-and-answer session with Henson and a large audience after a screening. Though publicists were discreetly pointing at watches, Henson happily took every question the audience could come up with, entertaining the crowd with a discussion of acting opposite Brad Pitt and a funny story about the garage sale she was planning to hold on the day she got an audition call for Benjamin Button.

During our interview the next morning, we mentioned her enthusiasm for the Q&A, which some actors dread. “Even as a child,” she notes, “I’d be at the playground and by the time I left, everybody knew me. I guess that’s just something in me, but I love reaching out to the people and talking—especially about something that I’m passionate about.” These days, everyone wants to talk about the Oscar buzz surrounding her Benjamin Button performance. Not bad for someone who once bailed on acting and majored (albeit briefly) in electrical engineering.

“What happened was a detour,” she explains. “What happened was I auditioned for Duke Ellington’s School of the Fine Arts in Washington, D.C., and did not get accepted. I really thought that I couldn’t act. I really thought that meant ‘well, you’re not good enough.’ So it was time to go to college and I had to do something. So electrical engineering; don’t ask me why. [Laughs] It was sort of like eeny meeny miny mo.”

Henson tried electrical engineering at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, but she knew what she really wanted. “I would literally every day have my face pressed up against the glass at Theatre Arts knowing in my soul that that’s where I belonged, but I couldn’t break through that fear,” she recalls. She finally got up the courage to audition for a play but then, after her tryout, she lost her nerve. “They said come back tomorrow and we’ll post who is invited to the callback. I never went back; I was too scared. To this day I don’t even know if I got a callback.”

It’s a great story but hard to believe given how focused and fearless Henson has been since then. After failing precalculus, and with loving support from her father, Henson auditioned for Howard University’s Theatre Arts program and got accepted.

Twenty years later, she’s still grateful for the education it gave her. “I owe my tough skin to Howard. They didn’t give you anything. Even if you were known as one of the stars, you had to audition for each and every part; you had to fight for it. That gave me what I needed to go out into Hollywood and make it.” That’s exactly what Henson did. With an infant (the father of her son had died suddenly) and $700 to her name, Henson went to Hollywood and started auditioning.

She’s worked steadily for the last decade, first gaining widespread attention for her performance in 2001’s Baby Boy. In just the last two years, she’s had a recurring part on Boston Legal, supporting roles in Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys and Kasi Lemmons’s Talk to Me and lead roles in the upcoming romantic drama Not Easily Broken and Katrina story Hurricane Season.

Henson faces special challenges as an African-American actor. “It seems like Hollywood, they find one black woman who is good at this one thing. If I do something really good like Baby Boy, then I get all the ghetto roles and baby-mama roles. I turn them all down because I already played her. I don’t need to do it again. Even with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, now I’m getting [offered] all the mama roles, and I’m like ‘Have you seen me? I’m still hot and sexy; I don’t need to play nobody’s mama.’ ”

African-American actresses, she notes, are too often offered the same limited set of characters to play and not allowed to explore their range. “Where is the black Meryl Streep?” she asks frankly. “Where is our black Cate Blanchett?” Henson’s happy to talk about that, but on the topic of her chance of an Oscar nomination, she’s mum. She wouldn’t want to jinx it.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is in theaters now. Not Easily Broken opens January 16.