Teyonah Parris is the new face of beauty in Spike Lee's 'Chi-Raq'

During the second-season premiere of "Survivor's Remorse," the Starz show that follows professional basketball player Cam Calloway as he starts to enjoy his first big contract, actress Teyonah Parris charts a familiar path as Missy Vaughn.

Missy is the wife of Cam's cousin and manager, Reggie, and on a whim, she decides to free herself from a regular regimen of hair relaxers and go natural. She comes home from the salon, takes one look in the mirror at her newly shorn locks, and sobs.

"I just wanted to start fresh," she tells Reggie through her tears. "Be the me I'm supposed to be."

She looks to Reggie for reassurance.

"It'll grow back, right?" Missy asks miserably.

As it turns out, that scene was culled from a very similar one in Parris's own life.

A few years ago, after seeing a "beauuuutiful, gorgeous" woman rocking an alluring natural style, Parris, who had relaxed her hair for much of her life because that was the norm in small-town South Carolina where she grew up, decided to experiment. She grew out her roots, cut off all her relaxed hair, and then, like Missy, panicked.

"I didn't want to step out the house once all my relaxer was off and it was a little 'fro. I was crying," she said during a recent interview at Washington, D.C.'s, Jefferson Hotel. "Like, who the hell - where am I going? And it was so beautiful. It was a little twist-out, and my friend came over and twisted it out, but I was like, 'I can't do it.' She literally had to hold my hand and we walked out. She was like, 'You're crazy. You have a very narrow idea of what beauty is and it has to shift.' And I really just had to work on it and it was not easy because I'm continuously bombarded by images that don't look like me, that say 'this is what beauty looks like.' So I had to recondition my mind."

And by the 2013 Emmys, it was. After pictures of Parris on the red carpet began to circulate, she became a superstar on natural hair websites and YouTube tutorials from those seeking to replicate the work of Hollywood stylist Felicia Leatherwood.

So her turn as Lysistrata in Spike Lee's new film, "Chi-Raq," feels like an emotional journey matured. Her character takes the same name of the titular character from the Aristophanes play in which a woman stages a sex strike to end the Pelopponesian war.

As Lysistrata, Parris is positioned as the pinnacle of beauty and sexuality, so much so that "she made both George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson want to kiss her," and Beyoncé herself "bow down" as the film's narrator, Dolmedes (Samuel L. Jackson) explains.

It's a call back to the themes of "School Daze," Lee's 1988 film that explored intra-racial colorism.

"It's no coincidence, and Spike said this himself, he knew what he was doing when he had a chocolate sista with natural hair, thick lips, big nose, booty and thighs, all of that, as the lead in this film," Parris said. "It was very intentional to have someone who looked like me carry this story and represent women."

Parris pulls it off. Lysistrata walks the streets of Chicago as though she's got oil wells pumping in her living room, transforming them into her own personal catwalk.

(Lee doesn't just subvert casting type with Parris; he tapped the relatively lighter-skinned Nick Cannon to play the rapper Chi-Raq, who seems like an obvious allusion to Chicago rapper Chief Keef. The parallels strengthen considerably through the film when taking into account Chi-Raq's unwillingness to give himself up, and Keef's own refusal to return to Chicago because he has outstanding warrants. He now lives in California.)

At this point in popular culture, natural hair on black women feels fairly commonplace. For Janelle Monáe and Solange, being natural is old hat. Both Tracee Ellis-Ross and Yara Shahidi rock natural hair on ABC's "Black-ish." There, it operates as a signifier of Ross's character's upper-middle-class hippie ideals, but by and large, being natural has been uncoupled from connotations of "earthiness."

For Parris, hair functions as a powerful tool for character development. When she played secretary-turned-office manager Dawn Chambers in "Mad Men," she rocked a prim, short style that underscored Dawn's conservatism, especially in contrast to the other black secretary at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, Shirley (Sola Bamis), who sported a stylish Afro, the latest (shortening) hemline trends and hoop earrings to the office.

As Missy Vaughn in "Survivor's Remorse," her long, straight hair signaled someone manicured and cultured, the sort of woman well-versed in navigating the country club set. When she cut it off, it was a subtle signaling of the Vaughns' financial stability that Missy felt comfortable taking such a risk. The second season of the show opens on a shot of Cam's new mansion in the tony Atlanta neighborhood of Buckhead, a significant upgrade from Cam's first-season downtown penthouse apartment.

Parris also appeared in "Dear White People," in which she played Coco, a cynical college student who wants to dissociate herself from her meager beginnings in every way possible. More than anything else, she wants you to forget that she's black. She clings to her long weaves and her blue contacts because she feels as though it's the only way for her to get ahead.

In all of those cases, so much is communicated about her characters before a word of dialogue is ever spoken.

Hair was just one consideration with Lysistrata, and Parris collaborated with Lee to make her feel three-dimensional, to establish her as a human being with her own needs and drives separate from those of her rapper boyfriend. That, Parris said, was by design, and practically required, given how rarely females have any input into scripts. "I got one maybe a few months ago," she said of a female-written screenplay, noting how few and far between they are.

"While Lysistrata is the lead in the movie and the source of the change and the action, we are making a film written by men and men are filming it," said Parris. "I was surrounded by men that entire time and so I had to remember that, just not only as an artist, but as the character and just as a person, Teyonah. Sometimes you feel overwhelmed because there is so much male energy. I'm playing this woman who's strong and confident, but at the same time, I, Teyonah, and having to deal with being surrounded by men and it's just a different energy. And I used that, trying to take control of that, to fuel also what I was doing with Lysistrata, just finding my place and making my voice heard and making sure I was heard and understood and using that to also fuel what Lysistrata was doing."