When we start chatting, Sanaa Lathan’s a bit punchy. There’s a huge, high-decibel construction project going on outside her modest L.A. home, and she keeps interrupting herself to giggle, sigh loudly, or apologize for the noise. “Do you hear this? It’s horrible!” she yells, a loose, almost mischievous laugh spilling from her as it does many times over the course of our conversation. “This is when I wish I had a 9-to-5.”
Much of her early chatter is like this: funny, warm, but a little impersonal. In interviews, Lathan is traditionally guarded — many of her answers pour forth politely and fully formed, like she’s given them hundreds of times, and she evades questions about her internal and personal lives. It’s only after we’ve developed a rapport, and the sound of bleating trucks has considerably weakened her resolve, that she allows occasional glimpses at what she calls her “soft heart [surrounded by] a steel exterior.”
