The most emotional moment in ‘Straight Outta Compton’, according to Dr Dre
For Dr Dre and the other surviving members of NWA, watching the Straight Outta Compton biopic must have been a strange experience.
Witnessing the story of their young lives recreated on the silver screen was presumably weird, especially in light of the fact that one of their members had long since passed; revisiting moments involving Eazy-E, in light of his death at 30 in 1995, was tough.
Dr Dre, speaking to Big Boy in 2015, the year the film came out, admitted that the scenes involving Eazy-E could be especially hard to watch unfold, even admitting to getting emotional on set because of them.
Dre first of all began by commending the “incredible job” that actor Jason Mitchell did in playing Eazy. In the years leading up to the film’s production, casting rumours had gone around that Eazy’s own son, Lil Eazy-E, was going to take on the role, but they ultimately proved untrue. For Dre, Mitchell unequivocally ended up being the correct choice.
Reflecting on the moments that made him emotional during production, Dre pointed towards a scene set in a hospital, where Eazy-E learns the news of his HIV/Aids diagnosis, which was naturally a trying moment.
“His acting was that great,” Dre said of Mitchell’s performance during this sad scene, “Goosebumps, you know what I mean?”
In real life, things had moved very quickly for Eazy. He was admitted to the hospital for a nasty cough in late February 1995, which is how he learned that he’d contracted HIV, and he announced the news publicly a few weeks later, after ten days of which, he had died.
Dre’s relationship with Eazy had famously been fraught at times, but, according to the former, their final conversation had been a good one. He once told The Hollywood Reporter that they’d spoken on the phone before Eazy died, “talking about the mistakes we had made in the past”.
The pair even apparently spoke about “potentially getting back together and making another record”, which never came to pass and surely made the Eazy scenes in Straight Outta Compton all the more difficult for Dre.