Derek Luke
The deaths of Notorious B.I.G and Tupac Shakur rocked the world of hip hop back in the nineties as well as making headlines all around the world.
But the movie Notorious didn’t just focus on this part of the Christopher Wallace story as the movie followed a young boy as he tried to make a better life for himself on the tough streets of New York.
“Well you know what the story that I was trying to tell was how a boy became a man he grew up in a tough area of town without a father and live could be tough.”
Derek Luke shot to fame in Friday Night Lights and 2008/09 has been a very busy period for the actor as he mixes up his roles moving from war movie to comedy to this biopic picture.
He takes on the role of Sean Combs, the man that discovered Wallace and helped him on his way to stardom, as well as making a name for himself along the way.
But the Sean Combs that appears in the movie is not the superstar that we know today as P Diddy the self made man also struggled in his early years as Luke tried to bring to the big screen a character that we didn’t know.
I learnt that he had a lot of tragedy in his life that started as a young man and that tragedy pushed him in his life. And that tragedy was his dad was in the air force and when he came home, almost similar to Biggie, there wasn’t a lot of work.
“He was killed on the streets and so from a very young age, similar to myself, it made us go into ourselves and become men overnight. Unlike in London where you are crowned men at a certain age manhood started very very early.
“The film also talks about him wanting to win and not wanting to lose so it focuses more on the competitive aspect of Sean.
“I learnt that he and Notorious were great friends, they were business friends but they were also great friends. They went from nothing to something together Notorious put trust in Sean and Sean put trust in Notorious.”
But in order to understand the many parts of Combs that most of us don’t know about Luke spent a lot of time with the man himself and the people closest to him.
“Part of the research was spending time with Sean Combs as well as attending dance classes and Sean said that rapping was one of the best jobs in the world and he was right it definitely is one of the best jobs in the world I went to dance classes and I felt like I was in Making the Band camp (laughs).
“I went and talked to Sean and listened to several of his songs, but the difference was I was playing a guy twelve years earlier not the guy that he is now.
So he was just as ambitious but not as polished. And Sean said that I could talk to anybody so I hung around his studio, but he let me hang around his studio for only one day he told me that I was getting to much information.
“Then I made a request to talk to Sean Combs mom and I spent an afternoon with her talking about her son, I told her that in order to do her son justice I need to gather as much information as I could. I didn’t want o play a guy that everyone knows, of thinks that they know, I wanted to play a guy that you didn’t know and that was my goal. “
But Sean Combs was already aware of Derek Luke as an actor had personally suggested that he should take on the role in the movie.
“Yeah the audition process was pretty cool as I got an ok from Sean Combs himself. But I heard on the grapevine that he had seen me in Friday night Lights and he was a fan and that I was top of his list to play him and I was flabbergasted.
When I was growing up they were the guys that were cool, and I was thought to be uncool, and so to grow up and have the cool guys kind of select you was the coolest point of my life.
Notorious is just the lastest music biopic to hit the big screen, following in the footsteps of Ray and Walk the Line, and with it comes a certain amount of responsibility to tell the right story.
“Well in hip hop there is a saying that if they don’t like the story then they will let you know. And hip hop is very important to me because it was the voice of our generation and it’s not just the voice of one colour.
“And because the voice was so important to me I had to tune out the voice because I know, in order to do the job that was necessary, I could not listen to other people’s opinions. “
Up next for the actor is comedy Madea Goes to Jail, which teams him up with Tyler Perry one of the hottest directors in Hollywood at the moment. He is also moving into television with new medical drama Trauma.
Notorious is out on DVD now.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw