ESQUIRE'S HOLLYWOOD'S 8 BEST RAPPERS TURNED ACTORS

[JumpinJack AJ]

This is a short, vague list that leaves out a few people, but it's still worth a glance.

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Hollywood's 8 Best Rappers-Turned-Actors

By Barry Michael Cooper on January 17, 2014

As hip-hop prepares to invade Hollywood once again, with this week's nationwide release of the buddy-cop comedy Ride Along, starring Ice Cube and Kevin Hart, it is important to note that both industries share the same birthplace. The ghetto.

Young visionaries like Louis B. Mayer, Adolph Zukor, and Harry Cohn — emigres from Eastern Europe's bleakest 'hoods — created Hollywood at last century's dawn, as a means of assimilation. The movies were a way to create "an empire in the image of America," according to Neal Gabler's instructive An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1988).

The same can be said of rap's cinematic pioneers like Charlie Ahern, Fred "Fab Five Freddy" Braithwaite, Russell Simmons, and the late, great George Jackson. This quartet transformed the spontaneous combustion of Bronx clubs like the T-Connection and Disco Fever, and the narco-glam soirees of Harlem World and Broadway International, into the box-office dynamite of Wild Style (1983) and Krush Groove (1985). Hip-hop was the ticket to the celluloid excursions of Spike Lee, the Hudlin and Hughes brothers, John Singleton, Mario Van Peebles, and F. Gary Gray. Def Jam, Death Row, Priority, and Bad Boy became the new Actors Studio.

So what's next? Macklemore and Ryan Lewis in a remake of The Servant? Why not? Rap is trying to be all that it can imitate.

In ascending order of greatness, here are seven of hip-hop's own who have lit up the silver screen in truly memorable performances:

8. Cameron "Cam'ron" Giles

Back in 1998, I worked on a few early drafts of Charles Stone III's indelible Harlem 2002 drug epic, Paid in Full (adapted from the harrowing cautionary tale of former cocaine pusher Azie "AZ" Faison). After viewing the finished product, I felt that Cam'ron had channeled Brando. Emboldened by Stone's nuanced direction and the rich performances of Mekhi Phifer and Wood Harris, he almost steals the entire film. Watching the main characters' success with a dagger-like intensity, Cam'ron transforms his Rico into the Iago of St. Nicholas Avenue, a level of playa-hatin' that becomes Shakespearean. By the time he wheelies his Suzuki down an entire city block after killing a treacherous stick-up kid, the audience knows that Cam'ron's green-eyed monster does indeed "mock the meat it feeds on."

7. Chris "Ludacris" Bridges:

Fast & Furious notwithstanding, Ludacris made his presence known in several feature films — The Wash (2001), Crash (2004), Hustle and Flow (2005) — before landing the career-defining role of Darius Parker on Law & Order: SVU. His portrayal of a smiling psychopath in two episodes ("Venom" in 2006, and "Screwed" in 2007) was poignantly frightening. Like someone begging you for a hug, and then stabbing you several times, just because he felt like it. It takes serious acting chops to pull that off.

6. Sean "Diddy" Combs:

Though he got mixed reviews in the 2008 ABC telecast of Raisin in the Sun, the multi-millionaire mogul and devout multi-tasker unveiled a strong comic performance as the megalomaniacal Sergio in Nicholas Stoller's 2010 Get Him to the Greek. Playing an outsize version of himself in this rock fable, Diddy managed to upstage the marquee players, Russell Brand and Jonah Hill. His hilarious physicality (Combs's foot chase of Brand and Hill's speeding automobile is reminiscent of both Jerry Lewis and Martin Lawrence) was balanced with impeccable comic timing. ("Sergio gonna be fine. Fk a recession. I own twenty Koo Koo Roos!") His role in Ivan Reitman's Draft Day (starring Kevin Costner and slated for an April 2014 release) is smaller, but don't be surprised if hip-hop's Bad Boy for Life proves to Hollywood once and for all that he ain't goin' nowhere.

5. Dana "Queen Latifah" Owens:

In addition to wielding rap's sharpest pen of the '90s, Flavor Unit's First Lady has been honing her stagecraft for more than two decades. Her wildly popular '90s sitcom Living Single proved she was just as adept at slapstick as she was at sobering drama, evidenced by her strong and emotionally vulnerable dom Cleo in F. Gary Gray's poetic heist film Set If Off (1996). Latifah's quiet courage as the AIDS activist Ana in Nelson George's soaring and emotional HBO drama Life Support (2007) evoked Simone Signoret's hushed dignity in Jack Clayton's Room at the Top (1959). Latifah's portrayal was so good, many critics thought she had been robbed of an Emmy nomination. Either way, the talk show host and film producer might want to begin preparations for an acceptance speech in the near future.

3-4. O'Shea "Ice Cube" Jackson and Dante "Mos Def" Smith

If the father of the UK's "Angry Young Man" theater, John Osborne, were still alive, he might be working with one — if not both — of these fiery emcees. Like Richard Burton and Albert Finnery, Cube and Def are adept at sculpting rage into thespian gold. Though Mos (a.k.a. Yasiin Bey) has been acting since he was a kid (The Cosby Mysteries), his politically conscious persona (with rhyme partner Talib Kweli) was just as influential on his stellar, 2004 Emmy-nominated performance in the HBO medical drama Something the Lord Made. Ice Cube parlayed his rep as the most revered West Coast lyricist into becoming a savvy producer of the Crenshaw-flavored, Cheech and Chong-ish Friday trilogy. Thriving in action comedies like All About the Benjamins (co-starring the insane Mike Epps, written by Ron Lang, and directed by '90s rap-vid wunderkind Kevin Bray in 2007), and the latest Ride Along, Ice Cube is still capable of tremendous dramatic range, as when he played the profoundly doomed Doughboy in John Singleton's superb Boyz n the Hood (1991).

2. Will "Fresh Prince" Smith:

Gabriele Muccino's 2006 Pursuit of Happyness revealed that Will Smith was the most dynamic actor in Hollywood. His psychological conflation of anger/grief/pathos/joy was an exploration into his Chris Gardener's wounded soul. His rapid ascent began when the innocuous Fresh Prince sitcom (based on the life of manager extraordinaire Benny Media, and whose co-creator Jeff Pollack and co-star James Avery recently passed) became one of NBC's biggest hits of the '90s. His New Jack Swing-y "Parents Just Don't Understand" was one of rap's first recipients of a Grammy. Will Smith was a dude from 'round the way driving films like Independence Day (1996) and Men In Black (1997/2002/2012) to billion-dollar box-office receipts. Rakim was right: it ain't where ya from, it's where ya at.

1. Mark "Marky Mark" Wahlberg:

Yeah, I know: Y'all forgot all about Dorchester's own Funky Bunch and their "Good Vibrations." Wahlberg has been on his grind so ferociously, it's easy to be impacted by that kind of hip-hop amnesia. Not that Wahlberg was a wack emcee. On the contrary, his chiseled physique and and the constant licking of his lips were actually his first acting gig as the white L.L. Cool J. But Wahlberg's vocation involved a lot more than just spitting 16 bars of magma and being a Teen Beat cover boy. Mark Wahlberg was a man aiming for Hollywood prepotency. His epiphanous performances in P.T. Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997), Scorsese's The Departed (2006), and David O. Russell's The Fighter (2010), in addition to becoming HBO's hottest producer — Entourage (2004-2010), In Treatment (2008-2010), and Boardwalk Empire (2010-) — places him in rarefied Hollywood air. Wahlberg — like Burt Lancaster, Kirk and Michael Douglas, Robert Evans, Sidney Pollack, Robert Redford, and Robert DeNiro — was an actor who became a producer with clout. A line reader who became shot caller. True, George Clooney and Brad Pitt are in that club, too, but I don't think either one of them can uprock to a house-music jawn clocking at 127 BPM, either. Right now, Mark Wahlberg got Hollywood on lock.

Posthumous Honor: Tupac Amaru Shakur

After watching Tupac in Ernest Dickerson's examination of the fragility of young black manhood, Juice (1992), I was convinced I had just seen hip-hop's James Dean and Montgomery Clift. I was in Cali, hunkered down at the infamous Nikko Hotel, working on a draft of Skeezer (released in 1994 as Sugar Hill). I ordered the film — written by Gerald Brown — three more times. What made Tupac one of the greatest American actors that ever lived — despite his short life span — was his total immersion into each role, including "2Pac," the character he played until the very end. What enshrines him alongside Dean and Clift was Tupac's willingness to excavate that dark shadow inside of himself — that dark shadow in all of us — and place it center stage. Actors are paid large sums of filthy lucre to live as someone else. A chosen few pay a much higher price, as they allow us to watch them live as themselves. Those are the actors who endure long after the fini.

You were the best that ever did it, 'Pac. God rest your soul.

(Thanks to my sons for their help and research.)

Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture.

[MaxFly]

Wow... what a terrible, terrible list. Off the bat, no LL, Ice-T or Common, but somehow Diddy and Cam'ron are on this list. And Mark Wahlberg over Will Smith... Will Smith is a premiere talent in Hollywood. 2 time Oscar nominee with a ridiculous box office draw... something like 10 straight 100 million dollar movies, not to mention that he's the most famous actor worldwide.

I know people have various reasons for not liking Will, and many wish he had stuck with music, but he's legitimately the biggest movie star in the world, and that's been the case for the better part of a decade. This list amounts to an insult. SMH

[JumpinJack AJ]

I agree with all you said, except I can deal with Mark being chosen over FP. Mark hasn't taken breaks like FP has. Also, while Mark has movies that seem written for him (Italian Job, Four Brothers, Shooter, etc), he has taken on a wider variety of movies with a variety of budgets. I think that's the edge he had on him for the list.