Janelle Monáe, the not-so-secret weapon of 'Glass Onion'

NEW YORK (AP) — To get a sense of Janelle Monáe’s powers of transformation, look no further than her Instagram photos of past Halloweens. Monáe doesn’t just throw something on. When she turns into the White Rabbit from “Alice in Wonderland” or Diva Plavalaguna from “The Fifth Element,” Monáe looks legitimately ready to step onto a movie set.

“I am indeed a self-proclaimed transformer,” Monáe says, smiling. “I love going outside of what I think I know about me.”

Monáe, who grew up in a working-class Baptist family in the Quindaro neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas, first remade herself in music as a retro-styled dynamo. Performing in a tuxedo and a vintage pompadour, she fashioned herself as a time-traveling android alter-ego named Cindi Mayweather. Acting was probably inevitable for Monáe, who studied musical theater at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy before dedicating herself to music.

“It is that character building that I love,” Monáe said in a recent interview. “I love just getting my body into discovering a new way to talk and to breathe, and, hopefully, being a reflection for other folks. Go outside of who you think you are every day.”

But as much as Monáe has been a natural, full-body entertainer and a red-carpet head-turner – a self-evident movie star -- it has sometimes seemed since her two 2016 big-screen debuts in “Hidden Figures” and “Moonlight” that Hollywood hasn’t known quite how to fully harness the wide-ranging talents of such a self-propelled, mold-breaking Black female artist.

But in Rian Johnson’s whodunit sequel“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” which debuts Sunday on Netflix, Monáe may have found a film to suit her proclivity for shape shifting. In Johnson’s puzzle box of a movie, Monáe’s character is the most mysterious and...