What we learned from the 'Empire' Q&A

Empire

The New York Times

Jussie Smollett sang 'Blurred Lines' a capella on his audition tape

Hiiiii

Gabourey Sidibe's character Becky was written as a boyish white girl

The Oscar nominee explained, "I was having lunch with (series creator and her Precious director) Lee Daniels said if you like that, we can just ignore that and figure it out. I said yes to the boyish white girl! I said yes to life!”

Nobody thought 'Empire' would get aired on broadcast TV

Taraji P. Henson: "I'm like, my character beats one son with a broom and calls the other the F-bomb! ... I figured, we'll get this awesome piece of work in the can, Fox will choke and it will end up on cable."

Terrence Howard: "Mine's got an (expletive) ex-wife, a gay son, a bipolar son and a crackhead son."
Moderator Elvis Mitchell: "Wait, did I miss an episode?"
Executive producer Danny Strong: "Season 3!"

Ta'Rhonda Jones auditioned to play Tiana before being cast as Cookie's assistant Porsha

"At first, I thought I was auditioning to play a rapper on Lucious' label," she explained. "Then I thought I wanted to play Tiana. But they told me they had something else in mind for me."

Turned out that was the role of Porsha, who was described in the script as "a ghetto bunny."

And she didn't know who Lee Daniels was before the audition

Jones recalled, "I  was like, 'thank God for Google.'"

More interestingly, she explained what she'd been doing up until that fateful audition: "I was working as an assistant at a nursing home.  When it came time to give her boss notice, she said, "Hey, shawty, I’m gonna be on this show so you’d better get all the work out of me while you can!"