I know I’m going to be in the minority, but I’m going to say it anyway. The Wendy Williams movie actually made me like Williams’ ex-husband, Kevin Hunter and showed that he wasn’t the villain he was made out to be.
The highly-anticipated biopic debuted Saturday night on Lifetime and naturally, Twitter couldn’t wait to weigh in.
The movie stars Ciera Payton as Williams and Morocco Omari as Hunter. While Payton certainly captured Williams’ mannerisms and is a dead ringer for the talk show host, her performance didn’t measure up to Williams’ larger than life personality. She also failed to nail Williams’ signature Jersey girl accent.
Omari on the other hand, gave a towering, yet cool performance in the movie, capturing Hunter’s menacing mystique.
The outspoken talk show split from her husband of 20 years of marriage after he fathered a child with his mistress. The kicker? He had been dating his mistress for 10 years.
Dissecting Kevin Hunter’s Relationship With Wendy Williams
From the beginning of the movie we could see that Williams was looking for love and to a larger extent, validation. Her mother, Shirley, who passed away late last year, constantly criticised her for her weight and her father, Thomas never seemed to intervene to protect his daughter.
To an extent, Williams was also looking for validation and protection. Hunter provided just that. From the time they met, it was clear that Hunter, who was several years younger than Williams, was an alpha male. He was independent, had his own place, his own car and didn’t seem to need Williams for anything.
He was a welcome change from all of the men she had dated in the past.
In addition to his good looks and buff physique, Hunter appreciated Williams for who and what she was. He knew she was a coke head. He didn’t judge her. He knew she wanted plastic surgery, he told her she didn’t need it, but supported her decision anyway. He saw her vision for her life and wanted to do whatever it took to help her.
He was also incredibly protective of her. When Bad Boy Records girl group members showed up in front of Williams’ radio station, presumably to beat her down, Hunter showed up and chased them away. He did not play when it came to protecting Williams, who was only his girlfriend at the time.
Kevin Hunter Was Hurting, Too
One of the points I think the public missed is that Hunter experienced his share of hurt in the relationship. Not only was Williams constantly working – she is a professed workaholic – but she suffered several miscarriages during their relationship.
The couple share an adult son now, but it was a rocky road to get to that point.
Viewers learned that Williams suffered from a weak cervix, so when she stood up, her cervix could not support the weight of the baby. In addition to that, she suffered from Grave’s disease, a condition where the thyroid overproduces hormones.
As a result, she had to go on bed rest for close to a year. During that time, Hunter took care of his wife’s every whim, even making the trek back and forth from Philadelphia where she worked to New York. The movie portrayed him as a doting husband in every respect.
He did admit to having an affair in the year his wife was on bed rest, which naturally upset Williams. And while the optics are indeed bad, think about his position.
Hunter, in the film, notes that he was hurting badly, too from the miscarriages and just needed someone to talk to. Someone who was not Williams.
What I respected was the fact that he was very direct when confronted.
Now, he certainly doesn’t get any husband-of-the-year awards for what he did. But, he is human after all.
I think Williams misses her ex-husband a lot. It appears she formed a serious codependency on him that is hard to shake.
She admitted in the biopic that she gave up her cocaine addiction in four days and she did it for Hunter, who was not a drug user. It seems as if she replaced one addiction for another.
I’m sure Hunter was a douchebag at times to his wife, but I certainly don’t see him as the villain that Williams and the public painted him to be. At least not in this movie.
I did a review on my YouTube channel, be sure to check it out below.
XOXO,
This Bahamian Gyal
