Gabrielle Union talks ‘Truth Be Told’ and the toll her character took on her

Gabrielle Union joins the Apple+ series Truth Be Told as Eva, a high school principal who raises awareness about the missing Black girls in her community. The offer for the role came during a time when she wanted to stay away from darkness, but she took it on knowing that friend Octavia Spencer would be by her side.

“We have been trying to work together again for over 20 years. I trust her in a way that I don’t trust most people in this town in our industry. So if I was gonna do it, it would need to be with someone I trust, like Octavia,” Gabrielle tells HelloBeautiful.

Union says she’d tapped into sex trafficking in Atlanta nearly eight years ago on Being Mary Jane, so she thought she was “prepared” for the role. She later realized she “needed to know what the victims were experiencing today.”

“I just had to dive into personal stories of girls and women who have gone on record and shared their truths,” she says. “And each one moved me closer to Eva.”

It also brought her back to being raped, gradually giving her “new pieces of information that [my brain] had decided that I could not handle at the time.”

“I would come home and I would cry every day,” Gabrielle says. “I would literally run off of set every day … There were days it felt like this job is really trying to kill me,” Union continues, noting she felt that way for five months.

After wrapping the show, Gabrielle went to Malibu with some friends and participated in a rebirth ceremony. She’s now ready “to claim my fullness and release who I was so I can embrace who I am and who I will be.”

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