Method Man has playfully shaded Anthony Mackie over his portrayal of 2Pac in the Biggie biopic Notorious.
Appearing on Carmelo Anthony and The Kid Mero’s 7PM in Brooklyn podcast, the Wu-Tang Clan legend revealed he didn’t think Mackie should have taken the role in the 2009 film.
AD LOADING...
Meth, who is an award-winning actor himself, started off by praising the Avengers star before sharing his honest feelings about his role as Tupac Shakur.
“Anthony Mackie, brilliant fucking actor. I love him and he deserves all the accolades that he gets,” he said. “Except for that 2Pac role. I ain’t like that shit. You shouldn’t have took that one, bro. Your agent, I hope you got rid of that n-gga.”
AD LOADING...
Method Man, who appeared on 2Pac’s All Eyez On Me album, went on to discuss the challenge of playing the late rap icon on screen.
“For somebody to really embody 2Pac, nothing against my boy [Demetrius] Shipp, the brother didn’t really have a lot to work with,” he said. “I heard they didn’t get a blessing from 2Pac’s mom as well. He had a lot of obstacles in his way so we cannot blame him for that performance.
AD LOADING...
“You have to really embody, not just the rap part or the thug part, but his whole mentality, his aura. Everything about him was just different from anything we’d seen before.”
His comments can be seen at the 52-minute mark below.
Anthony Mackie played 2Pac in Notorious, which also featured Jamal Woolard as Biggie and Derek Luke as Diddy.
Oscar-nominee Angela Bassett also starred as Biggie’s mother Voletta Wallace, with Power star Naturi Naughton playing Lil Kim and Method Man’s The Wire co-star Anwan Glover portraying Snoop Dogg.
The film, which was directed by George Tillman Jr., co-written by former Hip Hop journalist Cheo Hodari Coker and produced by Diddy and Voletta Wallace, was released to mixed reviews and was a minor financial success.
Demetrius Shipp Jr. later played 2Pac in the 2017 biopic All Eyez on Me, which saw Woolard reprise his role as Biggie. The film received much criticism from fans as well as critics and was a flop at the box office, though it did receive blessings from Diddy and Suge Knight.
AD LOADING...
2Pac was also played by Marcc Rose in Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac and The Notorious B.I.G., as well as a brief scene in N.W.A‘s Straight Outta Compton, while Adrian Arthur portrayed him in the TV movie Surviving Compton: Dre, Suge & Michel’le.
