Top of the sass - Hazelle Goodman in 'Deconstructing Harry'

Interview, Dec, 1997 by Elizabeth Weitzman

Until this month's Deconstructing Harry, had there ever been a color more daring than ecru on a Woody Allen set? As Cookie, a vision in (hot) pink, Trinidadian-born comedian Hazelle Goodman infiltrates Allen's very white, very uptight Upper East Side world with an entirely welcome, merrily incongruous lack of neurosis.

Some, no doubt, will gripe that Allen's first major black woman character is a whore. But while the members of the privileged class, including Allen's Harry, run around literally and figuratively screwing everybody else until their lives are completely blurred, Cookie is the film's voice of reason and compassion. And the gregarious thirty-four-year-old, who's played dozens of roles in her one-woman shows, had no problem being asked to squeeze into Cookie's vinyl short shorts and halter top. "There was a place inside of me that just went, Yes! I mean, to strut around a bit and be paid for it? To have it be legal and not have to give up anything? Child, I enjoyed it," she asserts. "You know," she adds, as matter-of-factly as Cookie faces down Harry's kvetching, "it takes balls to be a prostitute."