How 50 Cent brought extra intensity to ‘Den of Thieves’
50 Cent, by his own admission, is perfectly happy to take notes from a director when he’s acting in movies. In fact, he actively wants them to be as specific as possible.
“I like for them to know what they’re asking me to do!” he once said of directors, speaking to The Movie Waffler in 2018. “Sometimes, the director will give the actors notes, but they won’t be as informative or clear as we’d like. If they’d like you to make an adjustment, that’s fine. But I like them to know exactly what kind of adjustment they’d like.”
Still, even though he’s willing to accept critique and direction from those in charge of a movie, he does have a limit for it. While he was working on the heist movie Den of Thieves, in which he starred with Gerard Butler, there was one particular note from director Christian Gudegast that 50 just wasn’t willing to tolerate.
Gudegast had an idea about how his character should react to being shot, but if there’s anyone who knows something about how people who get shot react in real life, it’s 50 Cent. On that particular front, he requires no notes.
50, famously, was shot nine times in the year 2000, being wounded in his legs, hands and face. It was, obviously, a horrific experience, but, as he would remark to Oprah Winfrey 12 years later, it didn’t actually hurt that much. At least, not in the immediate aftermath—the pain comes later. He told her, “It doesn’t hurt as much as people imagine it hurts because of your adrenaline and how the shock of what’s actually going on. It hurts after”.
What really comes to affect a person following a harrowing experience like that, according to 50, is the trauma. “Going through that experience, when you get hurt that bad, either your fear consumes you or you become a bit insensitive… There was a point where I was afraid… and then in the recovery process I got tired of being afraid.” For the rapper, the only way of such a deeply dark space and mask the fear is to counter it by becoming “more aggressive and to be angry” about it all instead of facing the facts of what he was really feeling in his heart.
This was obviously a formative experience for 50, as it would be for anybody who has experienced anything like it, and it was something that he drew upon during the production of Den of Thieves. His character gets shot in the movie, but while they were filming that scene, the director didn’t like what he was seeing. He offered the rapper some constructive criticism, but he kindly declined to listen.
Remembering how the shoot played out during a conversation with Front Row Features, 50 said, “There’s a point where I get shot in the film, and Christian was like, ‘No, you didn’t do that the right way’. I said, ‘Trust me, I know what I’m doing’.” Gudegast, surely, was in no position to argue with that.
50 Cent’s gruelling experience getting shot has played a huge part in his career since. His music, so often characterised by violent lyrics, was imbued with a sense of authenticity because, clearly, he knew what it was to experience violence firsthand. And, when it comes to depicting getting shot on film, he absolutely knows what he’s doing, whereas few other actors or directors can claim to have lived through it for real.