Meagan Good was a guest on SiriusXM Urban View’s The Clay Cane Show on Feb. 23, 2023. Although the actor, director, and producer sat down to promote the second season of the popular series Harlem, the conversation turned towards the project that made Good a household name – Eve’s Bayou.

There’s no denying that Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou is a classic with its cast of heavy hitters, which also includes Lynn Whitfield; Samuel L. Jackson; Diahann Carroll; Debbi Morgan; and Jurnee Smollett, gothic genre, and depiction of a bourgeois Black Creole family in 1962 rather than one confronting the ills of a society built on racism. The film had such an impact that it’s easy to recall dialogue, if not whole scenes, nearly 26 years later. But there’s a lot we didn’t know about Eve’s Bayou until now.

In the film, Carroll plays Voodoo priestess Elzora, which makes sense given the setting of the Louisiana bayous and the Batiste family’s heritage, but what is most jarring is the white face and heavily-rimmed eyes that Carroll wears in most of the film. It helped make the audience believe that Elzora could affect a person’s fate with a spell. While Lemmons is an amazing storyteller, the idea for Carroll to wear the makeup was all hers.

“You know what’s crazy is because I was so young, I didn’t really understand what Diahann Carroll was, the powerhouse and just like the beast,” said Good to Cane, “and what a huge deal it was for this beauty icon to now come in and like, ask, can I just paint my whole face white and let’s do like some voodoo makeup and like all these things.”

She continued, “So I just remember Diahann Carroll being lovely and gracious and really wanting to sink into this character, and everyone was shocked. They were like, ‘Are you sure you just want to do your face like this?’ And she’s like, ‘No, this is exactly what I want.’ We were just like, wow. […] She didn’t come to play baby.”

As a 14-year-old, Good said she naively thought that Hollywood was full of Black female directors like Lemmons, who also wrote Eve’s Bayou. Even though she was wrong about the film industry’s inclusivity, which remains an issue, she realizes that it helped her dream about being behind the camera too.

“It was my first big movie and it was a Black female director, so I just thought there was a bunch of Black female directors,” explained Good, who made her directorial debut in 2014 and directed the second episode of Harlem‘s season 2. “I didn’t know I was looking at a unicorn at the time. And so what that did for me was really in hindsight, looking back now with the directing that I’ve been doing and how much I love it, it just told me that that was possible whenever I got to that point. And I wanted to do it. It just was completely tangible to me because that’s one of my first examples.”

With the nostalgia that has been sweeping across TV and film, the conversation unsurprisingly turned towards whether a sequel focusing on Good’s Cicely Batiste and Smollett’s Eve Batiste is possible. (Fun fact: Good appeared on an episode of On Our Own, which starred Smollett and her siblings, in 1994.)

“We’ve talked about it a lot. We’ve talked about it a lot, but I think sometimes when something’s so special, I don’t know if it’s a good idea to touch it, but that would be up to Ms. Kasi. If she ever said she wanted to do it, I think all of us would jump on board,” Good said.

So which of her movies does she think deserves to be a trilogy?

“I mean, I do think it’s time for another Think Like a Man. I’m like, let’s go for three for three,” revealed Good, who is finishing a project she worked on with her Think Like a Man and Think Like a Man Too co-star Terrence J.

Most actresses have a dream project or biopic they’d like to work on, and Good is no different. 

“Maybe Eartha Kitt. […] It’s so funny because I was just talking to Tyler [Lepley], my castmate, last night about this specifically because I was saying I loved kind of how she said, ‘Compromise? Compromise for what? For what? For who?’ […] And I was like, I get that. Because to me, I just feel like when someone genuinely loves you, I think compromise is a natural thing, but I don’t think it’s something that you should be asked to do. I think it should be an authentic thing that you want to do that is not expected of you. It just happens naturally. And I’m a big believer of just letting people be exactly who they are, the fullness of their authenticity. And I think that’s because that’s what I desire as well. But I think everybody deserves that.”

The Clay Cane Show airs Monday to Friday at 1 p.m. EST on SiriusXM Urban View, ch. 126. Learn more about what Good has in the works, her desire to play Whitney Houston, and her thoughts on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences continuing to snub Black films in the video below.