‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’ Actress Reveals Laurence Fishburne Slapped Her in Cake Scene

Vanessa Bell Calloway’s most dramatic moment in What’s Love Got To Do With It was not completely pretend.

The actress portrayed Tina Turner’s friend Jackie, who tries to intervene when Ike Turner pushes her face into a cake in public. The moment is a fictionalization of an incident described by Tina in her 1986 memoir, I, Tina Turner, where after a similar situation, Ike forced her to eat an entire cake.

Speaking with Cocoa Butter about her most memorable roles, Calloway revealed that the moment Ike slaps Jackie came across so emotional and raw because the stunt went wrong.

“They wanted to put the double in for the slap, and then I’d pop up. So I told the director, I told Brian Gibson, ‘You know what? This is not going to be right because I need to be in the moment, and when I get up, then I could tell him off, and I need to have that energy, that adrenaline,'” Calloway recalled.

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“So [he] said, ‘Okay, the choreographer of the stunt, he’ll show you, he teaches you when this hand goes this way, you turn your head really aggressively, it looks like a slap, and they put the sound in later.'”

In a few takes, they got the timing right, but “On one take, we missed.”

“We didn’t have the eye connection and he slapped the living s— out of me,” Calloway revealed of the accidental moment.

“My face was pounding. I mean, it was like, ‘Thump!’ The one side of my brain was like, ‘Ow,’ and the other side was, ‘Oh, keep going, Vanessa. This going to be good. This going to be good.’ ”

Despite the fact that Calloway recognized that other people saw the slap connect, the scene went on and she stayed locked in.

“I slap, and I roll, and I get up, and baby, I let him have it. And that’s the take they used,” she shared.

“I don’t blame [Gibson], because if I was a director or producer, that’s the one I would have used, because I didn’t stop. Of course, when they cut, everybody ran to me with ice packs and everything to make sure I was okay. But I mean he slapped the poop out of me.”

In a 1993 interview with the Hollywood Foreign Press, Fishburne opened up about his mixed feelings about playing Ike Turner.

“I didn’t want to play Ike, to begin with, because in the script he was pretty one-dimensional. There was no explanation for his behavior or for why she would stay with him for sixteen years. And because those things were lacking, I was very hesitant, so I talked to the producers, they agreed that he needed to be fleshed out, and we were able to give him some history and texture, some real dimension and depth,” he explained.

“He is, dramatically speaking, the villain of the piece, so, no matter what you do, he’s the bad guy, and I understood that, but I wanted to make him interesting, to give him some attractive quality, something that would draw Anna Mae to him, like a spider weaving his web, almost like a Venus flytrap. Something that looks very pretty, that you are really compelled and drawn to and then, once you get close to this thing, it closes its trap on you and there’s no possible way to get out of it.”