Growing up, Corinne Foxx was mortified by her famous father: Jamie Foxx.
For years she and her Oscar-winning dad told family and friends with stories of how he regularly embarrassed his eldest daughter – and even chased her boyfriends away wearing ‘such tight pants’ that were ‘too young for him’.
Now they’ve taken those stories of fear and turned them into the new Netflix series aptly titled ‘Dad Stop Embarrassing Me!’, In which the ‘Soul’ star, 53, plays a single dad whose strong-willed teenage daughter moves with him.
When asked on a scale of one to ten how truly embarrassing the “Ray” superstar was, 27-year-old Corinne told The Post that her Pops topped out at 15.
“If you look at these stories now, you can laugh, they are hilarious,” she explained. “When you’re in the moment and it’s happening to you and you’re a teenager and everything feels like the end of the world … It felt like the worst that could happen was that he showed up at my football game in a tight leather jacket “Gosh, why is he doing this ?! Nothing worse than this!”
Corinne, whose mother is Jamie’s ex-girlfriend Connie Kline, said she is now in a very close relationship with her father, but it wasn’t always that rosy.
“My dad was very exaggerated, very charismatic,” she said. “I was more reserved and calmer, so we had these funny moments of tension or he embarrassed me.”
“Now I am at the age where I can appreciate all his quirks and that he is over the top, and I certainly now have a new perspective on all of his antics,” continued the former Miss Golden Globes. “We’re incredibly close and I think we’ve always had a yin and yang relationship where he was really over the top and I was more reserved and that’s where a lot of conflict happened in my teens. But now I think we can appreciate those qualities in each other and we use that creatively to our advantage. “
Corinne, who says they struck a deal with Netflix by essentially pitching her anxious teenage diaries, started out as a producer on the sitcom – which also stars her father’s former ‘In Living Color’ co-star David Alan Grier – and was promoted to executive producer halfway through filming.
“For the first few weeks I felt like a fish out of the water and scrambled to do everything,” she said. “I was like, ‘What’s my job description?’ and they said, “You just do everything!” I think it was a big learning curve I think it was a lot to be a woman and young and find your voice in the room and speak and hold on to your guns on certain issues. I had to build my confidence. Not to say someone was difficult to work with, it was just my own journey to go through. ”
Another project from the USC alum is the weekly podcast “Am I doing this right?”
“I talk a lot about mental health de-stigmatization, especially in the black community,” she said. “There is a lot of stigma about asking for help, and I feel like the more I can talk about my journey with my own fear, the more people will feel comfortable seeking help.”
Corinne also revealed that she “has been in therapy since I was 14 and I have a lot of coping skills, so it’s definitely in a better place now. I get worried about all the normal stuff, but especially in today’s world where the news just seems to get worse and worse. Tuning the news and mediating really helped me. “
