wow. this is 50 Cent looking very Christian Bale-in-The ‘Negro’ Machinist. Apparently he lost sixty pounds to inhabit his role as a football player diagnosed with cancer (via Vulture).
I still occasionally run into people out-and-about who will tell me they saw an interview with Curtis Jackson and how he’s so smart, etc. This would be another intelligent move; it’s smart to show people how far you’re willing to go for that Hollywood paper.
What this doesn’t convince me of is 50 Cent being able to act. It’s one thing to research and dress the part, but acting requires empathy, which is a different strain of intelligence than the usual +1 american capitalist math via which 50 has built his empire. Mostly because it’s a knowledge of self, as opposed to knowledge of ‘the system’.
I suspect lots of bad-acting rappers stumble with this because we talk about rappers being actors a lot. But that’s not a reference to DeNiro, Streep, or even Christian Bale acting. What we hear on songs is bad acting, which is not problematic on the radio because you’re not selling a movie. In the span of your average three-minute song there’s no time for inhabiting the nuance and detail of a criminal (or whathaveyou) persona. In a ninety-minute movie there is. In fact it’s necessary for an audience to stick with it.
Subsequently good acting is not learning that skinny people are ##-pounds lighter and hungry all the time. It’s learning, in a sense, how you would live your life as a skinny person. Opening yourself to different choices. This requires suppressing your ego, the very ego that pays the bills for most rappers. So it’s not that I don’t think Curtis has the capacity to be a good actor, I just think it’s tough for 35-year-old rapper to unlearn the habits of his original success. A skinny old Rottweiler has the same problem with new tricks as a musclebound one.
