NEW YORK — Lee Daniels is putting himself out there again.
The filmmaker and TV producer has never been shy about acknowledging the bits of his past that find their way into his work.
Even, or maybe especially, the not-so-pretty ones, like the flashback in the Fox hit “Empire” in which a homophobic Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard) dumps his high heels-wearing young son, Jamal, into a trash can, an incident taken from Daniels’ childhood.
“Star,” his new music-driven drama for Fox, premiered Dec. 14 after “Empire’s” midseason finale. It’s a gritty, absorbing story about three young female singers at the beginning of their careers, still far removed from the glitz of “Empire’s” Lyon family.
It’s personal, too.
“The Jahil character is me,” Daniels told me in a post-screening interview at SoHo’s Crosby Street Hotel late last month. He was referring to the character played by “Law & Order” veteran Benjamin Bratt who’s introduced in the pilot as a sleazy, dissipated-looking talent manager whom Star (Jude Demorest) meets in a strip club. She’s gone there hoping to persuade him to represent the girl group she’s formed with her half-sister, Simone (Brittany O’Grady), and their new friend Alexandra (Ryan Destiny).
“You said it — sleazy,” Daniels said of Jahil, who goes toe to toe in the pilot with the girls’ unofficial guardian, Carlotta — played by Queen Latifah.
“When you don’t have the foundation, and your father dies, and you grew up the way I grew up? I expressed what my family was like in ‘Empire’ if they had money,” said Daniels, whose father, a Philadelphia police corporal, was murdered in 1975.
“I don’t ever talk about the life that I led when I first landed in Hollywood, and the things that I did that I’m embarrassed about,” he said.
“My work is therapeutic for me. I have to look at myself in the mirror. And I want to make sure that kids don’t make the same mistakes that I made. And so, Jahil is me. He’s a drug-riddled, sort-of artist trying to find himself … not that I’m drug-riddled now, (but) when I was lost,” said Daniels, who co-created the show with Tom Donaghy (“The Whole Truth”).
“Jahil — he used his skills that he learned from the streets to survive. As opposed to pimping, managing, which is what I did. But I lived in the back of a church, and out of my car, and, yeah, so it’s very personal to me.
“And hopefully we’ll see his evolution, and how he finds, inevitably, God. And spirituality,” he said of the character (who happens to share a first name with Daniels’ partner of six years, stylist Jahil Fisher).
For now, the spirituality in “Star” is represented by Carlotta, who once dreamed of the kind of secular success that Star, Simone, and Alexandra are chasing but who when we meet her is running a beauty salon and singing mostly in church.
“My intention was to, in a very cool way, not hitting you over your head,” put God in the picture, Daniels said.
