Walk of Fame Honoree Nia Long on Hollywood, ‘Michael’ and Teasing New ‘Friday’ Movie: Ice Cube Is ‘About to Send Us All a New Script’

Long before Nia Long could picture her name pressed into the concrete of Hollywood Boulevard, she was a little girl on a city bus rolling down that same street — and her mother was at the wheel.

“We used to walk down the block and look at all the stars,” Long recalls. She remembers stopping at Dolly Parton’s star, reading aloud the names she knew, then turning to ask her mother about the ones she didn’t. The memory lands differently now, with Parton’s passing Aug. 25 at 80, days before Long sat down with Variety, and the child who once lingered at her star about to receive one of her own.

“I came here with very humble beginnings,” Long says. “This star is just as much for me as it is for my mother, because she’s the one who brought us here.”

Now the boulevard will partly belong to her too.

Long was named to the Hollywood Walk of Fame‘s Class of 2025 in the motion pictures category, and her ceremony is set for September 2026 — a milestone the 55-year-old actress admits she never let herself expect.

“I stay under the radar. I just do the work,” she says. “I’m diligent. I have a vision for what I want for my life and for my children and for myself, and I let God take care of the rest, because I don’t want to be caught up in the hype.”

For Long, the star is deeper than most people you may have seen receive the honor in recent years, and she grows visibly emotional recounting what it stirs.

t’s every girl’s dream, and everything women work hard for,” she shares. “The little girl in me is like, ‘Oh my gosh, we did it!’ And the woman in me is, ‘Take a moment and be proud of yourself.’”

She returns, repeatedly, to all the strong women who came before her.

“This isn’t about me. It is a culmination of generational grit and generational commitment, and I’m so lucky to be the one who, in this whole tribe, gets the star,” she says. “It’s the generations of women who have paved the way for me, who have prayed for me, who have guided me when they’re not even here on this planet anymore.”

Long is on Zoom, from her home in Los Angeles and seated at her kitchen counter with the sliding doors behind her, where a custodian is cleaning the deck that coyotes keep fouling. She’s relaxed about the whole ordeal — and if you grew up in a Black and/or Brown community of women, you’ve known someone like Nia Long, the kind of person you want to ask a dozen questions, because you know she gives the best advice. Midway through our interview, Long’s phone rings — it’s her son — and she answers without hesitation, excusing herself politely, tending to him before turning back. The interruption says what the interview keeps circling: everything, for Long, is about family.

That refusal to chase the noise has shaped a career spanning four decades. Born in Brooklyn to a first-generation Caribbean American mother from Trinidad, Long and her family landed in South Central Los Angeles via Iowa — a childhood of movement she credits with both her range and her rootedness. The family stayed in California almost by accident: her mother came to the West to be married, called off the wedding, fell for the palm trees and never looked back.

Her breakout role came with John Singleton’s “Boyz n the Hood,” the 1991 coming-of-age drama that made Singleton the first Black filmmaker nominated for Best Director and, at 24, the youngest ever. From there came “Love Jones,” “Friday,” “Soul Food,” “The Best Man” and her personal favorite of hers, “Roxanne, Roxanne.” Most recently, she plays Katherine Jackson in “Michael,” the Antoine Fuqua-directed King of Pop biopic that is now the highest-grossing biopic of all time.

Playing the Jackson matriarch — “who I like to say is the queen mother” — was a privilege that reconnected her to her own history. Long met the late Michael Jackson decades ago, through Singleton, and never forgot it. “He said my first and last name, and my shoulders perked up — he’s saying it like I’m somebody,” she recalls. Her interpretation of Katherine holds the ache just beneath the surface — a performance built on restraint, what I’d call an emotional simmer. Her reply: “The simmer is what makes the soup good. You can’t make a good soup if you just hurry up and boil everything.”

She wanted the queen mother “soft and quiet and there and physically strong but also tender.”

If a new generation is rediscovering Long and her contemporaries, she has a theory. The ’90s — its music, its films, its pre-social-media privacy — has become an object of fascination, and Long argues the era can’t be imitated or counterfeited.

“Certain things can’t be recycled. You have to go to the original source to get that Jones back that makes you feel so connected,” she says. “Everybody wants a taste of it. So where do you go? You go to the artist.”

Still, she reserves a particular tenderness for “Love Jones,” the 1997 romance that underperformed on release and has since become a touchstone for cinephiles, especially within the Black community. “It was ahead of its time for Black people. We bombed at the box office,” she says. The film carried a private meaning, too: her father was a poet, and it opened on his birthday. Playing Nina opposite Larenz Tate — who coincidentally plays Berry Gordy in “Michael” — was, she says, the film that whispered a promise: “I’m onto something. This might work out for me.”

Her comedic side hasn’t been as explored as many would have hoped. One of the first films I saw her in was the Whoopi Goldberg and Ted Danson comedy “Made in America,” and those comic roots may not be finished, either. Talking about “Friday” and its most-quoted line — “Bye Felicia!” — Long hinted the franchise will ride again. Her former co-star Ice Cube, she says, is “about to send us all a new script” for the simmering sequel.

For all the accolades, Long insists the work was never about fame. “I don’t need to be a movie star. I want to tell stories so someone in that audience can say, ‘I thought I was the only one going through this, and I’m not,’” she asserts.

She traces that philosophy to working with Singleton, who cast her when she was “a girl who lived on St. Andrew’s Place in South Central L.A. with my single mother.” “He was the first director who wanted to know who I was,” she says. “Those are the most prolific directors, because they’re looking at the woman, they’re understanding the talent, and they take their ego out of the process.”

The through-line of Long’s story is the brown-skinned women who showed her it was possible — Diana Ross in “Mahogany” chief among them, alongside Diahann Carroll, Stephanie Mills, Minnie Riperton and Phyllis Hyman. “She was brown. We were the same complexion and they all looked like me.”

She reaches, one more time, for Dolly — the star marker that stopped her as a child, and the woman the world just lost. “Like Dolly Parton said, ‘I’ve always known who I am, and I’m going to just always be who I am.’”

On the boulevard her mother once drove, the little girl will see her own.