In the emotional first look at Tyler Perry’s upcoming film Straw, Taraji P. Henson strips away the glamour to play one of her rawest roles yet: a single mother on the brink of collapse, trying to hold her family—and herself—together. “I’ve been there before,” Henson said in a behind-the-scenes interview. “That kind of pain, that kind of fight—I know it. I’ve lived it.”

“It wasn’t hard for me to reach back to those memories,” Henson says of preparing to play the character.

When Tyler Perry called Taraji P. Henson to tell her about a new whodunnit thriller he wanted her to star in, she was immediately interested. But she had no idea how powerful and relatable his Netflix movie, Straw, would be for her, or that they would film it while she was deep in production on another project.

“To think we shot in four days while I was still working on Fight Night,” Henson tells Entertainment Weekly with a laugh, referring to her Peacock limited series. “But that’s what I like about Tyler Perry, he’s fast, and I can be fast too. He knew he had a limited amount of time with me. He used it wisely.”

Henson stars in Straw (available June 6 on Netflix) as Janiyah, a struggling single mother caught up in a chaotic conspiracy that forces her to make impossible choices to care for her sick daughter. The movie also stars Sherri Shepherd, Teyana Taylor, Glynn Turman, Sinbad, and Rockmond Dunbar.

Taraji P. Henson in ‘Straw’.Chip Bergmann/Perry Well Films 2/Courtesy Netflix

“This one is a thriller, and I’ve never done a thriller with Tyler, so I was interested in that,” Henson says. “There’s a twist that happens that you don’t see coming — a whodunnit, in a sense. I can’t give away too much, so I’m trying to talk around it, but there’s some crazy twists and turns in there that’ll take you by surprise, that absolutely take the character by surprise.”

Henson loves how Janiyah is just a real person trying to care for her daughter, but she gets embroiled in a larger-than-life catastrophe that goes from bad to worse. “All she’s trying to do is cash her check and pay for her daughter’s lunch,” the actor says. “If you’re a struggling single mother, you can’t always pay for that regular lunch, and children who can’t afford that regular lunch get a separate lunch. And you know what happens then? Kids start teasing your kid. As parents, we feel our children’s pain deeper than them, and so that meant a lot to her. She’s like, ‘I just need to go make sure my baby eats the regular lunch so she’s not teased.’”

That’s where Janiyah finds herself in EW’s exclusive photos (below). While trying to cash a check, she’s wrongfully accused of attempting to rob the bank. “A whole lot has happened before that, though,” Henson explains. “The subject matter is a bit dark, so I was happy to only live in this character’s world for four days, because that energy is transferable, and it kind of sticks with you. So I was happy to get in and get out real quick. And it was very different from any other character I’ve ever played.”

Taraji P. Henson in ‘Straw’.Chip Bergmann/Perry Well Films 2/Courtesy Netflix

Still, she found herself relating to the story in extremely personal ways. “Janiyah is a woman who doesn’t have much in life, but she has a lot of love for her child,” Henson says. “I’m a single mother, so I understood her journey and her struggles. She’s a single mother trying to make the best of the cards that she’s been dealt in life. She finds herself in a horrible situation where one of those days, you wake up and everything that could go wrong goes wrong. It’s about how she maneuvers through it.”

Henson was struck by how Straw “showcases how easy it is for people in a vulnerable position to be disregarded or disenfranchised by a system that is supposed to protect them.”

“That seems to be still an ongoing thing in society today,” she adds. “I often see people having mental breakdowns on Instagram, and people post it in jest or making fun of it, but I’m like, at the end of the day, was that person treated like trash, or were they treated like a human who needed help? So I’m always interested in that, and that’s what I found very interesting about playing this character. This woman is just trying to make it through her day and take care of her child by herself, with all the odds stacked against her. I’ve been there before.”

Ashley Versher and Sherri Shepherd in ‘Straw’.Chip Bergmann/Perry Well Films 2/Courtesy Netflix

The knowledge that “we’re all one paycheck away” from becoming Janiyah is something that Henson hopes inspires empathy in viewers after seeing everything she goes through onscreen.

“That’s why I’ve made it a mission of mine to actually see people,” she says. “If I’m on the street, if I’m driving and someone has a sign up, ‘I got three kids, I’m in a bad way,’ I can’t drive past that without giving something. I was a struggling mom before. I remember when all I could afford was Hamburger Helper meals. And my son, to this day, will not eat oatmeal or Malt-O-Meal because that was the subsidized food you could get on the WIC checks, and every morning he would have it, so much that he doesn’t have a taste for it anymore. It wasn’t hard for me to reach back to those memories. It makes me grateful for all of that I’ve accomplished, for sure.”

And knowing that she and Perry accomplished filming Straw in only four days after their previous film, 2018’s Acrimony, was shot in five, has her considering what they could do for their next movie. Maybe a three-day shoot? “Who knows with Tyler!” Henson says with a laugh. “Could be possible.”