As she takes on Cleo in Je’Caryous Johnson’s Set It Off stage adaptation, Felicia Pearson reflects on lived experience, cultural legacy, and the discipline it takes to carry iconic roles.
By Kim SoMajor
Felicia Pearson has lived through the kind of reality most people only see in movies. That is part of what has always made her presence onscreen hit differently. Long before she stepped into Cleo’s role in Je’Caryous Johnson’s stage adaptation of Set It Off, Pearson had already become unforgettable to audiences as Snoop on The Wire, a character people believed because nothing about her felt manufactured.
“I’m from the hood. I’m from the neighborhood,” Pearson told The Source. “People connected with that. I don’t walk around trying to be bougie or none of that. I’m very humble. I’m a people person, and I think people felt that. They knew I wasn’t faking nothing.”
That lived truth has always been part of Pearson’s power. She does not come to a role sounding overworked or over-rehearsed. She comes to it with a realism people trust. It is also part of why stepping into Cleo did not feel like a stretch.
“I been Cleo all my life,” Pearson said with a laugh. “Except for robbing banks. It didn’t take too much to adapt to it because I know the movie like the back of my hand.”
That instinct made the role feel natural, but Pearson still knew exactly what kind of legacy she was stepping into when the call came.
“When I got the call for it, Mr. J was like, ‘You want to play Cleo?’” she recalled. “I was like, ‘What? I’ma murder that thing.’”
Even with that confidence, she never lost sight of what Queen Latifah built with the role in the first place.
“Can’t nobody outdo Queen. She did her. She was phenomenal,” Pearson said. “But when I stepped into it, I made it mine.”
For Pearson, stepping into Cleo meant carrying the weight of a character that was already bigger than the screen. Built inside the same unforgettable world as Jada Pinkett Smith, Vivica A. Fox, and Kimberly Elise’s characters, Queen Latifah’s Cleo helped turn Set It Off into a permanent part of Black film culture. The role has always meant more than attitude and quotables. Part of Cleo’s legacy is the freedom she carried, bold, dominant, and unbothered by anybody else’s rules.
That is part of why the character hit Pearson as hard as she did.
“When I first seen Queen Latifah play Cleo, I was in the penitentiary, and we was like, yes, it’s finally a gay girl that’s represented for us,” Pearson said. “Even though we knew she was acting, it just felt so real. It was groundbreaking.”
What stayed with Pearson was the kind of presence Cleo carried and how uncommon that image felt onscreen at the time.
“She was the first lesbian that played a real character,” Pearson said. “We never had a full-blown lesbian playing a dominant character like that.”
That kind of representation helped make Cleo more than a fan favorite. It made her part of the larger cultural legacy of Set It Off, which is exactly why stepping into the role still carries weight now.
For Pearson, honoring that legacy also meant rising to the demands of a completely different medium. Moving from film and television into live theater pushed her into another level of focus, where timing and control have to hold up in real time.
“Stage is very challenging because there’s no cut,” she said. “If you mess up, you gotta keep going. But you gotta stay in that pocket with your dialogue, because your stage mate gotta come in on their cue. I can’t mess their cue up and then the whole show be a mess. So even if something go left, you still gotta get right back in that pocket.”
That live setting gives Pearson a chance to bring Cleo’s energy straight to the audience, raw and in real time, without the distance of a screen. There is no edit to save you on stage. No second take. That pressure has forced Pearson to sharpen another side of her craft, one built on awareness, discipline, and staying locked in all the way through.
That growth has also changed how she thinks about her own path in the business.
“If I could talk to myself 20 years ago, I’d say listen more, study your craft more, and ownership,” she said. “Because coming from the streets and jumping straight into the industry, it was hard. I didn’t know the ropes. I didn’t have nobody to guide me. So I’d tell myself to pay attention more, have more faith, and learn the business better.”
Pearson’s path has never followed a polished blueprint, which is exactly why her perspective carries weight. The same woman audiences locked in on as Snoop has kept evolving, taking on new challenges without losing the edge and honesty that made people believe her in the first place. At this point in her career, she is still pushing for people to see more.
“It took a lot of prayer and a lot of strength and a lot of faith to be here and to keep going,” Pearson said. “I want people to see my full potential.”