The legendary Tupac Shakur scene that was entirely improvised
When Elvis Presley initially became famous, his manager, Tom Parker, didn’t believe in rock’ n roll. Like many people at the time, similar to the birth of hip-hop, they thought the genre’s popularity was a blip. This is why Elvis started acting in films; Parker wasn’t ready to let his main income fizzle out.
This started a trend where many musicians began acting in films the minute they gained any form of notoriety. It was a gold mine for production companies, as the people starring in the film already had a fan base waiting for them to come and watch. Subsequently, the likes of The Beatles, Frank Zappa and ABBA started appearing on the big screen.
This also applied to hip-hop. When many rappers started to top the charts, film production companies began snapping them up to have them appear in different pictures. Ice Cube appeared in Boys N The Hood, while 2Pac took to the silver screen when he acted in Juice.
While the trend of famous musicians in movies might have started as a cash grab, it gave many artists time to shine as the world realised that some people had real acting talent. These days, Ice Cube is remembered differently by different generations; while some remember him as a rapper, others know him as an actor. If 2Pac hadn’t been murdered before his time, the same might have been said for him.
He gives an excellent performance in Juice. You believe every word that comes out of his mouth, and no line of dialogue feels rushed or forced. This is impressive; however, it’s even more impressive when you learn that most of the script was improvised. The first draft had been written ten years prior, so the slang was outdated. The actors in the film were encouraged to improvise the lines so that they all played out as modern.
The result is an honest depiction of how people spoke at the time. Even the famous scene where 2Pac confronted Q (played by Omar Epps) at the lockers was done off the top of both actors’ heads. Epps is happy that the film was shot this way, as it was one of his first times appearing on screen, and it allowed him to become more confident and comfortable in front of the camera.
“Earnest [Dickerson] (the director) was dope so he was just like, ‘You know what needs to be said, just say it they way you would say it’. So we basically, me and Pac, freestyled the whole movie,” he said reflecting on his time filming, “So all of these great moments, even with Pac, the great locker moment and all that, this is off the top. One of us would sort of anchor it back to the beats, like ‘I’m gonna say this, and it’s like okay, yeah’.”
It makes sense that 2Pac would have been good at acting in the moment, given a lot of rap has a culture of freestyling surrounding it, but the fact he was able to transfer that to the big screen shows how versatile a creative he is.