All you mamas are welcome (in my car). |
Belly was not a bad movie. It was visually very interesting. |
Comedy just seemed like the way in. |
I walked in thinking, 'I have ten movies under my belt and now they want me to go back to making commercials?' I said, if I do that, I want it to be funny. |
I'm from that part of the country. I was born in Mobile. Ala. and grew up in South Carolina. I have family in Miss. Having gone through a number of hurricanes myself, none obviously as devastating as this one, one of the things you forget about is that at least as a parent, you're able to understand what has transpired in your life. But for a one- or two-year-old, it's a completely different level of devastation because everything that they know and have ever known is gone. |
Most of my friends between 21 and 31 are at different stages of figuring out what the hell they are going to do with their lives. It's a big part of our generation. What is the next step? |
Quite honestly, I didn't think the deal was going to make, because I wanted part of the creative control. I was impressed that they were making an offer to a non-athlete young black male to be a spokesperson for two and a half years. To their credit, they said, absolutely yes, they never questioned anything I wanted to do. |
Someone I met years ago explained to me the difference between a personality and an actor, a personality being Eddie Murphy or Roseanne Barr, and an actor being Morgan Freeman and Alfre Woodard or Marlon Brando. And in the shrinking world of sound bites, the Internet, and other mass media, there were going to be fewer actors and more personalities. |
Sort of like the March of Dimes, the kids get sponsors – uncles, classmates, older sisters and brothers, cousins – to say, 'Hey, I'll give you a dollar or five dollars for one lap around the track. The kids do a quarter-mile lap, which is one lap around the track at Drake Stadium, and the kids raise money for other children. |
That was one of the things that interested me about the character. He doesn't want to be a hero, and has no real desire to save the earth or discover aliens. He's sniffing around looking to see what will fall in his lap. |
That's how I found myself in the advertising world, with my partner. I was trying to get a tape of me doing something that I thought was funny. |
To be honest, I just didn't want to say "Thank you," "Please," and "Come again" for the rest of my life. I felt like if I wanted to do this - films and TV - I didn't have the expectation that someone else would write for me. So I started writing for myself. And for the most part, I lied. |
When you're trying to find that line between are you doing comedy, are you doing drama, what are you doing, Martin, for me, anchors it very often, because he approaches it from such just a pure acting standpoint. |
With this hip-hop generation — they think about who has gold teeth, instead of the destiny of mankind. |
You give the guy an Image Award three years in a row and then turn on him like that? If that's the role they want to fulfill, they need to send a clearer message. |