R&B singer Fantasia Barino has come a long way throughout her career. She began as a teenage mother with a dream who was catapulted into the spotlight after winning the third season of American Idol. Since then, the North Carolina native has gone on to record a platinum debut album and won a Grammy award, but even with the fame and recognition from her peers, she was still hit with setbacks.
Some of her family drama played out for reality television and there were multiple cancelations while she was starring in The Color Purple stage performance. Then, nearly ten years ago, the singer attempted suicide. Fantasia has been taking care of herself both personally and professionally, and in an interview with The Tammi Mac Show following the BET Awards this past weekend, the singer shared that she's just a "regular person."
"I don’t like the whole celebrity thing," Fantasia said when asked about her lifestyle. Tammi responded that Fantasia at least has access to things that regular people don't have because she has more money than they do. "You don't know that," she said. "A lot of artists that you see, they look like they have it and we smile and we come out and we put on a good show, but in real life some of them are struggling and we don’t have it. I’m just now building myself back up. I lost everything twice. So, I cook my own food. I don’t need no chef, I’m from North Carolina, my grandma and my mama taught me how to cook. I cook my own food, I don’t have a chef. I go get my own groceries. I don’t have a driver, I drive my own car."
"That’s fake," she continued. "I don’t want that life or else I quit. I don’t want it. It’s already a lot out here in the industry. I don’t want that life. I’m just like you, sis. I’m just like you. So no, I cook my own food. You’ve got to pay the trainers, but sometimes I get people to come in and just say, 'Yo, we just want to work with you. Post me.' I’m like cool, but I also tell them, too, God gave you gifts and talent and you can’t always give it for free. So I bless them for blessing me. So I cook my own food, I think you can do it yourself, and yeah, it’s not that for me. And I don’t want it to be that for me. If I had the money to do it, I still wouldn’t do it."
At the BET Awards, Tyler Perry delivered a moving speech while accepting the Ultimate Icon award and Fantasia was asked about her thoughts on his words. "Tyler Perry’s actually a good friend of mine. He would call and check up on me," Fantasia revealed. "He was one of the ones, when I lost everything, he came and blessed me. And I thank him for that Everything he said last night is true. You look around and you could be working for 10 years, you’ve got all these people on your team, you’re paying this person, that person, and you look up, and you don’t have no money in the bank because you’ve given it to everybody else. That’s what I said about prostituting your gift. You have a gift and you’re allowing everybody else to profit off of the gift. So I love what he said.”