Sherri Shepherd has more gigs than she can count these days. In addition to her acting career that spans from One For the Money to Precious and co-hosting for The View, Shepherd serves as guest star on the late night sitcom The Soul Man. Sherri recently sat down to discuss her career and family life with BET.
On not wanting to do a second round of ‘Dancing With the Stars?’ because of her son:
“Girl, that was such a dream for me. I got voted off so early, so I didn’t get a chance to do a salsa or a team dance. But I loved dancing and I loved doing the show, so it would have hurt so badly to say no, but I would have to. I didn’t see my son the entire time I did Dancing With the Stars. The only time I saw Jeffrey was when he came to the show Monday and Tuesday nights to watch me dance. You literally rehearse six to eight hours every single day — 40 to 50 hours a week.”
On marriage to Sal:
“I kept [our plans to marry] a secret for a whole year and as big as my mouth is, that was so hard. When I first started dating Sal, I was so excited and I wanted to tell the world. But Malcolm-Jamal Warner actually said to me, ‘Sherri, you really need to get your relationship strong before you allow the whole world into it. Because once the world is in it and if you don’t have a foundation up under you, it will crumble.’ He wrote me like a three-page email. Malcolm played my husband on my sitcom Sherri, but when Theo writes you a three-page email and tells you that…I really took that to heart, it allowed me to really let the relationship marinate. And now when I talk about Sal, we’ve got some stuff up under us. I was very conscious about discussing it on The View because the little bit I would say, people would go, ‘Oh, here we go again.’ I didn’t want people to think I was trying to get anything. Whatever Star’s journey was — mine was very, very different and I didn’t want people comparing us.”
On Sal’s greatest attribute:
“I love the fact that Sal loves my son. Oh my God, he puts Jeffrey probably before me. The fact that Sal loves my son so much that just turns me on.”
On not wanting kids on Twitter
“I’m just so against kids being on Twitter because they are not thinking about the ramifications of what they are saying or the emotion of how they say it. That’s why you have Paris [Jackson] apologizing for her attitude and people deleting tweets. To me that’s akin to when we were little, you did something wrong and your parents popped you upside the head. You’d say, ‘I’m gonna call the police!’ But you didn’t.”
Photo: @SherriShepherd
