A rare 2Pac interview from 1996 has been unearthed, and it finds the late rap legend detailing his career plans and ambitions — including wanting to “move away from music.”
Entertainment Tonight shared the interview clip on Sunday (April 23) to coincide with the recent premiere of FX’s Dear Mama docuseries, which explores ‘Pac’s relationship with his mother, Afeni Shakur.
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Chatting with the outlet prior to the release of his final movie Gridlock’d, which came out just months after his September 1996 murder, 2Pac spoke about wanting to put music on the back burner and focus on his acting career, partly in an attempt to rehabilitate his image.
“To have change in my image, really, number one,” he said when asked what attracted him to Gridlock’d. “This movie is really about friendship and what unconditional friendship means. I did it basically because it was funny and I’ve never really got to be funny.”
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Looking to further make his mark in Hollywood, the “California Love” hitmaker also hinted at starring in a rom-com and expressed his excitement at launching his own movie production company.
“We got a lot of good things happening,” he said. “If I say it right now, the way my luck has been going, it’ll all fall through … Just give me a month so I can lock it down before I tell everybody.
“I just want to push the envelope and work, work, work. I want to move further away from the music and start wading myself into the acting more.”
Still, music wasn’t completely out of 2Pac’s plans as he also spoke about wanting to develop himself as an artist and make more “thought-provoking” music, admitting that All Eyez On Me — his scorching debut on Suge Knight’s Death Row Records and the final album released in his lifetime — was fueled by “emotions.”
“The album that’s out now is just my emotions, it’s emotional, but it’s not thought-provoking,” he added. “So I want to do some thought-provoking work with my music, and I can do that if I’m working in the films because I grow and learn more things and have more to talk about.
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“If you in jail and you getting chased by the police, it’s like I haven’t gone anywhere from the block because I’m still talking about the same things, so the music reflects that. First, I gotta move out of the environment and then I have other things to write about.”
Elsewhere in the interview, 2Pac further showed his endearing personality and astute self-awareness as he spoke about his Gemini personality, failing in the public eye and learning from his mistakes, and his desire to subvert expectations and “go outside the boundaries.”
“People can tell you, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that.’ But my whole mind state is: if we don’t ever go outside of the boundaries, we will never change anything, we will never begin anything, we will never start anything,” he said. “We’ll just keep talking about the people who did it once and told us not to go outside the boundaries. That’s just like telling Christopher Columbus that the world is flat.
“I’m doing the same thing. They’re telling me, ‘You can’t do this, you can only rap. And if you rap, you can only rap about this. You can’t act, and if you act, you can only do the Black films. You can’t be an artist or a celebrity and go out still. You can’t be an artist and still have fun and still be true.'”
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He continued: “I don’t like that, so I try to go outside the boundaries — sometimes it’s effective and positive; sometimes it’s negative and it blows up in my face.”
Tragically, not long after the interview was conducted, 2Pac was shot four times in a drive-by in Las Vegas following the Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon fight. He died six days later after succumbing to his injuries in hospital.
His murder remains unsolved, although numerous suspects have been identified and theories have been floated.
