Karrueche Tran has worked hard to be taken seriously in Hollywood, but during a recent interview, the Claws actress confessed that the battle is still ongoing.
Tran remains defiant.
“I wanted to be taken seriously. I had hit a point in my life where I was like, ‘All right, let’s get it together,'” she told HuffPost. “And I had, with social media and with my previous circumstances, I had a little bit of a following. So I kind of just was like, well, what can I do? What can I do with what I have on my plate now?”
Tran faced public scrutiny throughout her relationship with r&b singer Chris Brown. In 2011, the pair began dating after they one of Tran’s styling jobs, and after spending three seemingly turbulent years with the star, the couple officially called it quits in 2014.
“I was just a different person back then, and I wasn’t presenting myself in the best way to the world, so there were a lot of perceptions about me, and I had to fight,” she said of the public’s jaded perception of her.
Throughout her career, Tran has starred in several movies and television shows, including The Fright Night Files, produced by Chris Stokes as well as The Dead Diaries, 3-Headed Shark Attack, The Nice Guys, and Only for One Night.
It was Tran’s performance as Virginia Loc on TNT’s series Claws, that finally turned everybody’s heads. But the journey for Tran is only just beginning. Having considered walking away from the industry, she cites actor Clifton Powell as the reason she is still at it. According to Tran, Powell advised her to continue with her acting classes and to stay on top of her game.
“I still have those people who kind of see me as the old Karrueche. But again, I can’t fight all my battles,” she said. “And as much as sometimes I look back and I’m kind of ashamed of it, it’s like, this is my journey and my story. This is what was meant for me to get to this point.”
“And I guess there really wasn’t just any other way because I am content with who I am and where I was inside,” she added. “I do want to continue to grow, thrive, and it’ll all continue to gradually happen in due time. But everything was meant to be the way it is.”
