Janelle Monáe on her whodunit 'Glass Onion', streaming December 23 in UAE

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 Friday 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 enigmatic of a colourful ensemble. If Knives Out gave Ana de Armas a chance to shine, Glass Onion is a revelation of Monáe’s many layers.

“It’s been an incredibly transformative experience for me as an actor,” Monáe says. “I got an opportunity to show range. This character goes from comedy to the deep emotional, heavy-lifting dramatic scenes all the way to action, where I found myself working with a stunt coordinator at five, six in the morning in Greece after eating baclava.”

The less said about exactly how Monáe fits into Glass Onion, the better. In Johnson’s film, which had a theatrical run in late November, Edward Norton plays a tech billionaire, Miles Bron, who invites friends to his private Greek island. Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is on hand for a murder mystery that spins out of control and a plot that, in dredging up Bron’s past, skewers a social media mogul not so unlike some of today's real-world tech tycoons.

“I got an opportunity to honour those women who are the minority in the majority in those spaces, who have their ideas taken from them, who are not given credit for their work, who have to deal with these alligators, deal with these tech bros, deal with these geniuses who in fact haven’t done anything except for cause confusion,” says Monáe.

Monáe is something of a futurist, herself. Earlier this year she published a collection of sci-fi stories titled The Memory Librarian, adapted from elements in her 2018 album, Dirty Computer. In it, Monáe depicts a future world where human desires are controlled by an organization called New Dawn and certain identities can be wiped by a drug called Nevermind.

Monáe, who was named best supporting actress for her performance in Glass Onion by the National Board of Review, loved the multidimensional characters of Glass Onion.