Credit: Alamy

The ongoing joke since the dawn of time centres around how musicians always want to be actors. It’s one thing to have crowds jumping whenever a song comes on, but to have an audience captivated in the theatre for hours on end isn’t something that you can replicate with a handful of great tunes onstage. While Ice Cube seemed to be the last person concerned with being family-friendly in the 1990s, he actually thought that his break into the film industry in Boyz in the Hood wasn’t cut out for him.

Then again, it seems like Cube had been playing the role of Doughboy his entire life. From the moment that Straight Outta Compton dropped, Cube was the de facto leader of the group half the time, and when he talked about his track record being on the same level as Charles Manson, you knew that he wasn’t exactly lying, either.

But how is that kind of tough guy persona going to translate onto the big screen? Sure, many artists have managed to put their all into the music, but when trying to depict it onscreen, it’s no surprise that directors use professional actors rather than try to give musicians a crash course in what acting is supposed to be.

Even when casting for Boyz in the Hood, Cube was convinced that director John Singleton would go with a true thespian for the role. After all, Cuba Gooding Jr was already locked in for one of the main leads, so all the members of NWA seemed to be closer to technical advisors to make sure all the details were right.

Once Cube talked with Singleton, he remembered being convinced he had what it took to bring Doughboy to life, saying, “His whole thing was like ‘the film version of what you are doing, and nobody is showing that.’ They got the East Coast versions of what this is, but nobody’s done our version like our Do the Right Thing. So he just kept saying, ‘Man, you Doughboy, you Doughboy, man. I could see it.’”

And for someone with the bare minimum of film experience, Cube actually turns in a great performance behind the camera. It’s not like the role called for Daniel Day-Lewis-style of commitment, but considering what he sang about in his songs, Cube was just depicting the kind of violence that he saw every single day.

In fact, there’s a part of hip-hop that always seemed to go hand-in-hand with acting. Whereas artists like Drake started off as actors before turning to hip-hop, the art of hyping yourself as an amazing MC uses the same tools that any film star has while finetuning a part, usually focusing on a few different lines to get the maximum impact whenever the tape is rolling or between ‘action’ and ‘cut’.

Cube would end up doing a lot more movies later on that had nothing to do with the guy who sang ‘Fuck the Police’, but Boyz in the Hood is still one of the most captivating films he ever made. Much like Purple Rain did for Minneapolis, this look into the underbelly of the streets of California took the basis of what NWA were all about and finally gave it a proper face.