Don’t believe everything you see when it comes to celebrities and the lifestyles they portray themselves to have. Actress and singer Naturi Naughton reminded everyone of that while sharing the reality of her experience being part of a girl group in the late ’90s and early aughts.
Naughton joined the co-stars of her new ABC series Queens — Eve, Brandy and Nadine Velazquez — as they visited The Breakfast Club to talk about their experiences in the industry and how they compare to what they acted out on the new series (premiering Oct. 19). All of the ladies, with the exception of Velazquez, have reached stardom in music, but Naughton, who was in 3LW, was the only one who was part of a group. She said some scenes in the new show were eerily similar to what she really went through. An example includes pretending to own a big house on Cribs with group mates Adrienne Bailon and Kiely Williams when they didn’t really own much of anything.
“There were moments when I watch, where I’m in the scene and I’m like, ‘Yo this really happened to me,’” she said. “That Cribs episode? I lived it! I was doing a fake Cribs. I’m telling everybody now on The Breakfast Club.”
“MTV did the Cribs, and you know, back when 3LW was hot, we had to pretend,” she continued. “But I didn’t have a car, I didn’t have a house, I didn’t have any of those things. But we did MTV Cribs. And then we wind up doing an episode very similar to that, without giving too much away, where you see how fake we have to project this image. I literally did that and had to clean the house by 7 o’clock to give it back to the owner. And get out of it!”
The star clarified that the girls didn’t literally clean the rented home from top to bottom, but they did have to collect their things and get out of it by a certain time.
“We had to clean up all of our stuff, get a cleaning person,” she added. “It wasn’t that bad, but things were bad.”
Naughton was a member of the group from 1999 to 2002. She alleged that she was driven out of the group and had altercations with her group members, including having fried chicken thrown at her. She did some solo work, but found great success as an actress. She currently stars as Tasha St. Patrick on the Starz Power spinoff Power Book II: Ghost and plays Jill “Da Thrill” on Queens. The show is a musical drama about a hip-hop girl group from the 1990s who reunite in their 40s to try to replicate the fame and success they found decades prior.