Landon Buford
On this week’s episode of The Crew Has It with Michael Rainey Jr. & Gianni Paolo, they have legendary actor Omari Epps as the guest. Epps plays Detective Malcolm Howard in Power’s Raising Kanan. During the episode, Epps revealed his best lesson learned. It came while filming Juice with Tupac Shakur.
“My forever best lesson was the experience of filming juice, my first film with Tupac Shakur, Ernest Michael, Henry Brown, and co-wrote like because and Juice; the script for juice was written ten years before we did it,” said Epps.
“So, all of the like verbiage and slang in there was way different from the 80s and 70s, ay sucker. So, Ernest was dope. He was just like, what needs to be said. Just say it the way you would say it. So, we basically me, and Pac like we freestyle the whole movie. so all of these Great Moments with even when Pac the great Locker moment and all that this is off the top.”
He added, “So, we just flew in, and one of us would sort of anchor it back to the beats like I’m gonna say this. And it’s like, okay, because we’re supposed to go here. That was great because it helped me improve my process of being in the moment and not being so rehearsed in this or the other. This is a cheat code, not a cheat code. It’s an attribute don’t over-rehearse because actors can be so over-rehearsed that if someone says something wrong, it’s not about the line.
Know what you’re supposed to say. So it might not be exactly what we both read on paper. Now we are flowing, and often, the writer, the director, they’re like, oh man, that’s so much better than that, leave it. When it comes back to auditioning, it’s as if as long as you feel good because it’s always a learning experience.”
Juice was released in 1992 and if you watch the film it has a lot of lessons that the creators of the project is trying to get a cross.
You can watch Raising Kanan every Sunday night on Starz at 8pm EST.
