Performing in a tuxedo and pompadour, she fashioned herself as a time-travelling android alter ego named Cindi Mayweather. Acting was probably inevitable for Monáe, who studied musical theatre at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy before dedicating herself to music.

“It is that character building that I love,” Monáe says. “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.”

In Rian Johnson’s whodunit sequel Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, streaming on Netflix, Monáe may have found a film to suit her proclivity for shape shifting.

“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 baklava.”

The less said about how Monáe fits into Glass Onion, the better. In Johnson’s film, which had a one-week cinematic run in late November, Edward Norton plays a tech billionaire, Miles Bron, who invites friends to his private Greek island.

“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 humans are controlled by an organisation called New Dawn and the identities of LGBTQ people can be wiped by a drug.

The multidimensional characters of Glass Onion, Monáe says, has given her more hope that she can find films that authentically connect with her.

“I just want to tip my hat off to those writers and directors who are thinking about dynamism when they’re writing these characters,” she says. That includes Johnson, who she has been a fan of since seeing his 2012 film Looper. Says Monáe: “I was like: Who is this guy who likes time travel as much as me?”

Johnson, for his part, felt he was working with “a true artist”.

“It’s not like she has a tremendous artifice to her, but I’ve never met her where she doesn’t look better than I will ever look in my life,” he says.

“She’s an entertainer but she’s also an artist. It’s not a facade that she just puts on for attention. All the stuff that she does comes from a place that’s really close to her heart.”

Through her creative hub Wondaland in Atlanta, Monáe is trying, she says, to “tell radical, rebellious, smart stories”. With studio A24 Films, she is developing a television series on Josephine Baker, the French dancer and World War II resistance fighter. She is eager for more.

“As timeless as I like to think I am, time waits for nobody,” Monáe says.

Regardless of future roles, for Monáe metamorphosis is more of a habit. On a weekend during shooting, Johnson sent out invitations to the cast to gather for their own murder mystery. Monáe arrived decked out as Sherlock Holmes, complete with top hat, beard, moustache, cane and cape.

Or, as Monáe says, “Ready to play”.