Vanessa Bell Calloway is giving real insight into the moment that shaped one of the most talked-about scenes in “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” The “cake scene” with Laurence Fishburne has been a topic of conversation for years, and Calloway finally explained why it hits so hard on screen. The slap that takes her character Jackie down wasn’t a neat stunt. It actually connected.

Calloway said production planned to bring in a stunt double for the hit, but she wanted to handle it herself. “They wanted to put the double in for the slap, and then I’d pop up,” she said in a recent interview with Cocoa Butter. She told director Brian Gibson, “You know what, this is not going to be right because I need to be in the moment, and when I get up, then I could tell him off, and I need to have that energy, that adrenaline.” Gibson agreed, and the stunt coordinator walked her through the timing. “He teaches you when this hand goes this way, you turn your head really aggressively, it looks like a slap, and they put the sound in later.”

Once Gibson called action, things shifted. “On one take, we missed. We didn’t have the eye connection, and he slapped the living sh*t out of me,” she said. Calloway shared that her face pulsed instantly. “My face was pounding. I mean, it was like thump. The one side of my brain was like, Ow and the other side was Oh, keep going, Vanessa. This going to be good. This going to be good.” She even joked in the interview, “I sound sick.”

The entire set knew it was a real hit, although she stayed locked in as Jackie. “I slap, and I roll, and I get up, and baby, I let him have it. And that’s the take they used. I don’t blame Brian because if I was a director or producer, that’s the one I would have used because I didn’t stop.” Once the cameras cut, the crew rushed in with ice packs to make sure she was okay. “He slapped the poop out of me.”

Angela Bassett’s performance stood out at the time for the way she carried Tina Turner’s reality. Turner shared her own truth in the HBO documentary “Tina” and said, “I had an abusive life. There’s no other way to tell the story.” Calloway’s behind-the-scenes story adds another layer to the history of a film that worked hard to honor Tina’s voice and the women who brought it to life.