Tupac's Acting Career Told Through His Co-Stars and Producers
Joe Torry (Actor, Poetic Justice): Janet had caught a cold from Q-Tip during the first couple of weeks of filming. Remember, they kissed in the car before he got his head blown off [in the first scene]. We didn’t know a lot about [AIDS] and Tupac had been known to be banging the bitches. He was smoking weed, coming to the set drunk, fucking bitches in the trailer. There was a little word that he had a dirty dick and that one of these bitches gave him something.
Shakur: ‘Pac was like, “Wait a minute. You treating me different. I’m a real nigga.” Janet had kissed Q-Tip in an earlier scene and caught a cold. Everyone was freaking out and wanted ‘Pac to take an AIDS test. Pac lost it. He went off on John in the trailer. ‘Pac was like, “Fuck that. Unless I’m having sex with her, I’m not taking an AIDS test.”
Singleton: That was a publicity stunt we came up with. Me, Janet, Tupac, Regina King and Joe Torry were sitting on the set. Everyone is trying to impress Janet anyway. I was like, “Man I don’t know about this love scene. You’ve been hitting all this shit. I don’t know if I want you touching my actress.” He’s like, “Fuck you man. We’re not fucking, so don’t matter whatever.” “You need an AIDS test.” “If we’re really fucking, I’ll do it.” You do shit like that and you know everyone is going to be talking about our movie.
Torry: For one or two days, this extra was messing with Tupac calling him “Four Pac.” That guy came back the next day and Tupac wanted to whup his ass. [This was] the scene with the older women. Tupac was like, “I’m going to whup your motherfucking ass.” He couldn’t really contain herself. I was like, “C’mon man. You’re smoother than that.”
I didn’t see [Dr. Angelou’s] reaction.
Dr. Maya Angelou (Actress, Poetic Justice): I heard [Tupac] cursing and using such vulgarity. Then the following day, he was in a big row with another young man about his age. I went up to [Tupac] and told him, “I want to speak to you, please.” He calmed down enough for me to ask him, “Do you know how important you are? When was the last time anybody told you or reminded you that our people stood on auction blocks so that you could live today? Somebody in your background decided they would stay alive despite this. They laid in the filthy hatches of slave ships to stay alive so that they would have some descendants. And here you are. You’re more valuable than you can imagine.” Later, when he wept and I wiped his face with my hands because I didn’t have a napkin or handkerchief. Then, I went to my trailer and Janet Jackson came and said, “Dr. Angelou, I can’t believe you actually spoke to Tupac Shakur.” I said, “Who is that?” I [later] told his mother, “I didn’t know six pack or eight pack or ten pack. I didn’t know.”
John Singleton: He was a sensitive guy. He didn’t know if he wanted to be a thug or revolutionary. I still dream about the movies me and Tupac would have made. I wrote Higher Learning for him. He was playing the Omar Epps role. The original cast to Higher Learning was supposed to be Tupac, Leonardo Dicaprio, Gwyneth Paltrow and Juliette Lewis. ‘Pac ended up getting in trouble and then all that stuff happened in New York. It was logistically impossible
Tupac was a handful on the set of Above the Rim. Around that time, he shot two off-duty cops in Atlanta and was also charged with sexual assault in New York. On November 30, 1994, the day before the verdict was supposed to be announced in the sexual assault case, he was shot five times at Quad Studios. He had been filming Bullet with Mickey Rourke throughout the fall of that year.
Wayans: He was a workaholic when we were shooting Above the Rim. He worked when people slept. When he finished on Above the Rim, he would go straight to the studio. He would be there all night making music, probably get an hour and a half sleep and come back to the dressing room. I shared a trailer with him and I could smell the weed and hear the music. I would be high as hell off the contact high. Our trailer was one big blunt. It was a hot box.
Leon (Actor, Above the Rim): When we were in the park, Tupac was running around with his pants falling down and people were passing blunts to the extras in the audience. During production we had to switch scenes around and things were delayed a bit because he was arrested a couple of times. It was madness.
Wood Harris (Actor, Above the Rim): There was a take that we did once. It was a real quick shot. It was nothing. It was me and Tupac driving into the scene and getting out the scene. We had the girls with us. We had to drive in, get out the car and go into the park and there was a cut after that. We’re talking about a pretty easy shot. Tupac drives, he parks and is trying to pull the knob up on the door and it’s not coming up. The door had a faulty knob where he couldn’t just smoothly pull the knob and open the door. It was like, “What happened?” “I couldn’t get this to come up. Somebody should probably change this because this thing is not working right. I can’t open the door from the inside.” The director ignored it. We do the scene and the same thing happened again. By the time he got his door opened, he got out the car, looked at the director and said, “I told you this was going to happen.” And he went straight to his trailer. I’ve never seen a person do that on a set. It didn’t come off like a diva. You see a lot of diva behavior on set like wanting the M&M’s separated by color. That wasn’t diva. He was just like, “Alright, I’m gone. Holla at me when you take care of that.”
Wayans: One time, Tupac was like, “Yo, this Range Rover. Why it got doors on it? Take the doors off. I want the doors off the Range Rover.” He was saying that a gangster isn’t going to ride in a car without tints.
Cindy Malika (Actress, Above the Rim): We were about to shoot the scene before he was going to get shot in the movie. This was after his friend in the movie [Wood Harris] got shot. Tupac called over the prop master and asked for a bottle of alcohol to sit on the table. The prop master was like, “I don’t know. It’s going to get a little crazy. It might spill and make a mess.” And Pac was like, “My best friend just died. I’m not going to sit here with one drink at a time, I’m going to want a bottle here in front of me.” That’s real. Tupac then went over and asked the director for the bottle because Tupac thought it was that important.
Martin (Actor, Above the Rim): We were on set and Tupac had just got back from Atlanta. Me and Marlon [Wayans] went to his room, and the first thing Marlon said was, “What are you doing man? You need to take the ‘T’ off of your stomach and you need to put ‘Hug Life.’ You need a hug, nigga.”
Wayans: [My mom] was like, “[Tupac] is a nice boy but he has a bad element around him. My mom told me not to hang out with him. But we hung out on set mostly and that’s when he went through a lot of troubles. I kind of listened to my moms. It wasn’t about him. It was the cloud of trouble around him.
John Enos (Actor, Bullet): We shared a trailer and I would show up the next day and there would be a Vibe magazine, some other hip hop magazines, an empty bucket of chicken and piles of tobacco that were emptied out for blunts. He was out on bail. He didn’t care. We burned the candle hard during that movie. We would get out at about 10 o’clock and go straight out, and then we’d probably have a 9 o’clock call.
Benza: At the time, Mickey was having trouble with [then-wife] Carre Otis. In between scenes, Mickey would be in his trailer holding rosary beads and crying. Tupac would be in his trailer soothing him.
Shakur: Tupac and Mickey Rourke got real tight. We went out once with Mickey and his [wife] at the time. He was like, “Man, Mickey and his girl are going through it again.” Tupac was giving him advice and being a friend. They had a real connection. Mickey was a guy’s guy. Tupac was a guy’s guy too.
John Flock (Producer, Bullet): Mickey always liked to think of himself as a street guy. I think he felt like Tupac was giving him some street credibility, which is what you want from a 40-year-old actor.
On December 1, 1994, Tupac was convicted on two counts of sexual assault and was sentenced to one and a half to four and a half years in prison. He was released on October 19, 1995. He immediately read the script for Gridlock’d, an offbeat buddy picture starring Tim Roth. Shakur earned the strongest reviews of his career for his depiction of Spoon, an addict looking to get clean.
Holmes: Tupac got out of prison and was broke. He wanted to do as much as he could do as he quickly as he could do it so he could get his feet on the ground. When he got out, I gave him the script to Gridlock’d. He got back to me immediately, not more than two days later saying that he would love to do it. I breathed a sigh of relief. Then I told him that a commitment has already been made on the other role and was about to go into an explanation who Tim Roth was and he was like, “Aw, man, I love his work.” He surprised me by how much he took to the script and how he aware he was of Tim Roth and his work.
Curtis-Hall: I first went to Laurence Fishburne, who was doing Othello in Italy. He wanted to do it but when we got into talking about it, he wanted like a million dollars. He also had a script of his own about heroin, Riff Raff. I then went after Don Cheadle, Forest Whitaker. Preston [Holmes] then said, “What about Tupac?” I thought Tupac was a good kid, a good actor but I didn’t want no rappers. Preston sent the script to Tupac and told me that he really wanted to sit down me. Tupac had just gotten out of jail and was staying at a hotel under the name “Welcome Homie.” I had to ask for “Welcome Homie.” We had the meeting and he was incredible. I told Tim [Roth] about it and Tim was like, “Can he act?” A few hours later, Tim calls back and says, “I can’t do the movie with him. I’m gonna get shot on set.” I told Tim to meet him. We all got together that night and went to some bar in Silver Lake. We sat around, smoked like eight cartons of cigarettes and drank like 40 beers and they just bonded.
Paul Webster (Producer, Gridlock’d): There is a scene where Tupac’s character has a very long monologue. Tim noticed that Tupac was really nervous and that he needed some support. He very calmly took Tupac through the scene off camera, calmed him down and we got the takes in. Tim supported him and Tupac was off and running. I think that was kind of illustrative of the cohesion between the two guys. They really worked well together.
Bokeem Woodbine (Actor, Gridlock’d): Here’s the part where Bokeem disappoints somebody. I’d go to Tim Roth’s trailer and he’d be like, “Hey, you want a beer?” And I’d hang out with Tim Roth for a few minutes and then go to Pac’s trailer and get blunted. I remember asking Pac, “You’re not hanging out with him.” Pac was like, “Nah, nah.” That doesn’t mean anything but sometimes when you do a buddy picture, you get sick of the person. At that time, to be truthful, Pac was like, “We don’t hang like that.” But he did say that he thought he was a dynamite actor…Lucy Liu was one of the actresses in the film. She practices [the Filipino martial art] Eskrima, you know, with the two sticks. And Tupac was feigning interest in it so that he could get closer to her. It didn’t work. He told me, “She got me over there waving these two sticks around when I’m just trying to get to her know if you know what I mean.” I was like, “How is it working.” “It’s not working too well.”
Damien Jones (Producer, Gridlock’d): Tupac was shooting music videos on the weekend and he was getting more and more exhausted so we had to ask him to bring that to an end because it was effecting the movie. You could see it on screen that the man was working long hours seven days a week. We managed to bring that to a halt. We would always shoot his close-ups in the morning because he would get completely high at lunchtime in his trailer and forget his lines and stuff. It made sense to shoot his close-ups in the morning.
Holmes: Tupac never seemed to rest. While we were shootingGridlock’d, he was working every day on a tough low budget film. Then, he was recording, doing music videos and writing nonstop. I once asked him, “When do you rest?” He said he didn’t have time to. I didn’t get into what that meant. He felt like he had to make the most of what time he had left.
Jones: Everybody around Hollywood loving the package and the price of the film. But, frankly, they were also all terrified of it because of Tupac’s bad reputation. I think he was on bail, probation and parole for three different crimes at the time. He was uninsurable.
Webster: Tim said to him one day, “Why do you do this stuff?” Referring to the violence and the dangerous side of the hip-hop world. He basically said to Tim, and I’m paraphrasing, of course, “It’s too late. I’m in it. I can’t get out. If I go straight now, I’m going to be a dead man.”
Tupac rarely got the chance to stretch and was usually typecast—in four of his six movies, Tupac played a variation of the thug/gangster role.
Brown: Tupac said that he got scripts but he was being stereotyped as an actor.
Flock: In our movie, he was playing some version of the image he portrayed in his career. Whether that was him or not, I don’t know. It was a thug life role. He came in and did the job and he got paid. It was a gas for him. It was an easy thing to do.
Leon: He’s mainly a rapper, so people are going to give him roles that suit the image he portrays. He lived and died thug life, so he was offered thug roles. It wasn’t like he was trying to make himself believable to be a doctor or lawyer.
Hughes: You’re already a hip-hop guy, you shot two cops in Atlanta—although justifiably he shot those two jokers. Then he allegedly attacked a director. [Writer’s Note: Tupac and a horde of gang members attacked Allen Hughes in early 1993.] That’s why he wasn’t working with high-caliber directors or getting a great role in a Spielberg movie. Trust me…Tupac signs with Suge [Knight], [Dr.] Dre leaves [Death Row] and I remember he was uninsurable. Everyone in the business, all the suits and the money are petrified of Suge. The suits fear of hip-hop, the white perception of hip-hop in the halls of the studios and there was the Death Row and Suge thing. It was a problem. It was a major problem.
Holmes: I was heading up Def Pictures for Russell Simmons, and we were in the final stages to put a deal together to develop movies specifically with and for Tupac. He wanted to do a black Western with all the coolest young Black actors of the time, a la Young Guns. He wanted to do a movie about Nat Turner’s slave rebellion. He felt like he had an obligation to use not just his talent but his celebrity to educate and to work towards progressive change in the world.
Terrence T.C. Carson (Actor, Gang Related): We talked about Black people in the business, where we’re going and what we should accomplish. He said that we needed to come together more and we need to have our own. I believe that had he been here, he would have been a driving force in this industry for us.
Singleton: The last time I saw him, he was working on “To Live and Die in LA.” I told him, “I’m working on this script and I think it’s going to be the one you win an Oscar for. It’s called Baby Boy.” He was like, “Let’s make it happen.” And a few weeks later, he was gone.
On September 7, 1996, Tupac Shakur was shot multiple times following a Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas. He died six days later. Gridlock’d and Gang Related were released posthumously. A script that he wrote in prison, Live 2 Tell, is planned to film next year. Antoine Fuqua was once attached to a proposed biopic, but that fell through. In the wake of Tupac’s death, we can only speculate on his massive untapped potential.
Leon: I was in Vegas the night he got shot. We spoke, of course. I was with my crew—Butch Lewis, who just passed away, Denzel Washington, Bob Johnson. Then we heard about a fight in the lobby involving him. We were at a private party later that night when we heard the news.
Marlon Wayans: I saw him right before he was shot in Vegas. I saw ‘Pac standing with a group of dudes. It looked like a cloud of trouble. About twenty minutes before he [was shot], me and Omar [Epps] saw him and were like, “What up ‘Pac?” I wave from a distance. Omar’s like,” Let’s go say hi.” We went over and gave him a hug. We walked away and got a cab. Twenty minutes after that, we heard he got shot.
Kain: I think Pac headed right to where he wanted to head. He talked about dying young all the time, which I thought was morbid. But he was right.
Jasmine Guy (Friend): We talked about scripts, stories, ideas. He wroteLive 2 Tell while he was in prison. He gave it to me and said, “Here’s the first draft. Go get it done.” I think that was the direction he was going to go in. He was ambitious and highly creative.
Holmes: The solitude of prison gave him the opportunity to reflect on his life. Live 2 Tell is about a young man, who, like many young Black men in the inner city, was doing what he thought he had to do to survive. He then decides to make a change and turn his life around. Once we settle on a director, we plan on putting the film into production. It’s just another example of his brilliance.
James Belushi (Actor, Gang Related): We had a connection that went beyond words. When we did a scene together, we never talked about what we were going to do. I’m a musician and he’s a musician so we would literally jam in scenes. I would take the lead energy in the scene, so if I went kind of up, he would come right in below like a nice bass line and we would just jam. You just don’t get like that by talking about acting. It’s just a chemistry, a nonverbal jam. And we jammed throughout that whole movie. I had a ball with him. We were trying to do a rap version of “Fly Me to the Moon.” He didn’t really know [Frank] Sinatra’s work. And we’d sit in his trailer and listen to it. He was so blown away by the melodic nature of Frank’s voice. We toyed with it for a week or two and he said, “That song, the way Frank Sinatra does it is just too beautiful to mess with.”
Collister: When you shot a close-up of him and he was trying to emotional or coy or flirtatious, it really came across. He had a really beautiful face, long eyelashes and really expressive eyes. He had really beautiful hands too.
Wayans: That dude had the softest hands ever. I used to call him the Palmolive Thug because his hands were so soft. Plus, he had these kind eyes. How are you going to be gangster with Mr. Snuffaluffagus eyelashes? I used to tease him.
Dickerson: It was hard to take your eyes off him. He always had an unpredictability. He had a way of finding things in the script that you didn’t know existed.
Harris: Tupac had a way of looking into himself and projecting outwardly an honest and truthful emotion. A good actor is one who can take the imaginary circumstance, which is in the script, and make it truthful. He was just truthful.
Hughes: His look is only like one-third of it. It’s his presence, charisma, depth—when you take charm and mix it with darkness. He was just a great actor. He never got the chance to do great acting.
John Singleton: He could be dangerous. He could be romantic. He was the perfect embodiment of young black manhood at that time. I think he could have evolved into an actor like a Denzel Washington.
Hughes: Denzel has got to hand that baton to somebody. I don’t see who that is right now. He was definitely going to be a star, the man. When we lost him, I said, “We lost a great actor.” He was going to be the actor of my generation.
Treach: Not taking anything away from nobody but him and Will Smith would be acting side-by-side. Tupac could have been in one of those $100 million grossing films. He was destined to be on the top of the bill.
Wayans: ‘Pac was eventually going to win some Academy Award. He was like a Frank Sinatra. He was that powerful. There was no ceiling.
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