Angela Bassett is reflecting on a powerful experience she had while watching one of her most iconic movies.

The How Stella Got Her Groove Back actress recalled watching What’s Love Got to Do With It in a crowded cinema in 1993. “I remember going to a theater in Pasadena — you know, sneaking in — with an audience and sitting in the back,” Bassett remembered in the new documentary Number One on the Call Sheet: Black Leading Women in Hollywood. “And just the, you know, Black folks, we’re very vocal in the movie theater.”

Bassett said that she cherished “the laughter” in the theater while watching her Tina Turner biopic, but was more moved by one of the film’s most disturbing scenes, in which Laurence Fishburne‘s Ike Turner rapes her protagonist. “[I remember] some of the things that would grab your heart, particularly the fish tank scene when he rapes her,” she explained. “I remember a young man in our audience, he said, ‘No! No!'”

The actress said that witnessing that viewer’s visceral reaction to the scene had a profound impact on her. “I stopped looking at the screen,” she said. “I’m looking at him — and that’s what you come to do. To affect. Oh, wow. Hallelujah.”

After playing secondary parts in major films like Boyz n the Hood and Malcolm X, Bassett finally got her first leading role in What’s Love Got to Do With It in 1993. “That was my first time being number one on the call sheet,” the actress said in the documentary. “And I think I knew that this role would — Well, you’ll know [my] name and face, whether it works or whether it doesn’t. Whichever way the mob flops.”

Turner provided her own vocals for the film’s musical scenes — and Bassett said that her own singing couldn’t possibly compare to the actual musician herself. “I’m no singer, now,” the actress said in the documentary. “I’m no singer. I’m a hell of a lip-syncer. Sorta tried to embody her essence. The movement, the dance, the physicality, the emotion of this beautiful, complex woman.”

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Number One on the Call Sheet: Black Leading Women in Hollywood is now streaming on Apple TV+.