The “nepo-baby” conversation is everywhere and is showing no signs of death anytime soon. In a recent interview, Rashida Jones, actress and daughter of Quincy Jones and the late model/actress Peggy Lipton, gave her few cents on the conversation and her relationship to fame, while sharing specific advice her famed record producer father gave her when she entered the workforce.
Speaking to InStyle, Jones explained how she “recognizes” the privileges of coming from a successful family in the industry, including financial freedoms and “industry understanding” that often keep others from getting in the door at all.
Jones recalled advice her father gave her after she graduated from Harvard University. “My dad said to me, when I graduated from college: ‘You’re gonna go wait in line with 70,000 other people for a job? That doesn’t seem really that practical...and he was right, you know.”
Even though Jones did benefit from her connection to her parents, she admitted that fame is “pretty poisonous for the most part.”
“I had parents who were in the public eye, but they were extremely protective of us,” she said. “[Fame] wasn’t that much a part of my reality.” She added that fame is
“People like the story of a legacy family and it’s fun to write about and it’s fun to think about you know, the ‘mini me’ and the person who looks like their mom or their dad,” she continued. “And then there’s the resentment there too. But I think about it as, historically, people go into the family business more than they don’t.”
It took Jones almost a decade after graduating from Harvard before becoming a recognizable face, after booking a role on NBC’s hit series, “The Office.”
“All of a sudden, you’re walking in New York and you’re used to just walking on the streets, and then somebody’s watching you,” she said