Ice Cube’s seminal stoner comedy, Friday, is brilliant. The 1995 film was made on a shoestring budget but became a huge, surprise hit which in turn secured massive funds for a follow-up. However, the 2000 sequel, Next Friday, made headlines for all the wrong reasons. It was missing Ice Cube’s counterpart from the original, Chris Tucker. Ice Cube recently revealed that Tucker quit the series citing “religious reasons”.
“We were ready to pay Chris Tucker $10-12m to do Next Friday but he turned us down for religious reasons,” Ice Cube explained in a Tweet Wednesday, December 29th. “He didn’t want to cuss or smoke weed on camera anymore.”
Ironically, Tucker’s character was called Smokey, so for anyone that hasn’t seen the film, you’ll understand just how big of a stoner he was. During an interview with All Urban Central in November, Tucker himself admitted that these were the reasons why he departed.
“Back then, I gotta tell you, one of the reasons why I didn’t do the second one was because of the weed,” Tucker revealed. “Man, that movie became a phenomenon. I don’t want everybody smoking weed and I never really told people this because I kind of forgot about it, but it was one of the reasons why I didn’t do it. Because I said, ‘I don’t wanna represent everybody smoking weed.'”
Tucker continued: “And that’s one of the reasons why I said ‘Nah…’ I didn’t wanna keep doing that character. It probably was good for me because it kept me moving to the next phase and next movies.”
In other news, Ice Cube recently left the production of comedy Oh Hell No, after declining to get the Covid-19 vaccine. In choosing to do so, he turned down a $9 million payday.
Watch the trailer for Friday below.
