This weekend (July 29th), Kendrick Lamar will make his acting debut on the hit television show Power. While some of the details of his role have been revealed (more on that later), Kendrick sat down with creator and showrunner Courtney A. Kemp to speak on the episode.
Kendrick and Kemp revealed that Lamar will play a drug addict named Laces that does dirt for 50 Cent‘s character, Kanan. During their sit-down, Lamar revealed that the role the culmination of four years of trying to figure out how to fit the rapper into the series.
“What happened was [50 Cent] was like, ‘Kendrick had mentioned he wanted to be on the show,’” Kemp said. “And then I got on the phone with Kendrick and said, ‘What do you want to play?’ ‘Cause that’s my favorite thing to ask an actor. ‘What do you want to do that you’ve never done before?’ That’s my favorite question. And then he said, ‘You know, I’d like to play’ — well, he didn’t say ‘drug addict, ‘but he used a different word [laughs]. But so then we created the character Laces.”
“We always wanted — we had already broken part of the season, and we were always going to have 50’s character use someone else to kill a bunch of ‘tinos,” Kemp continued. “So those two things came together very naturally. We already had the idea in place. And then Sophia Derry wrote this incredible script and this incredible character in Laces, for Kendrick to play. And he showed up to win, you know?”
Kendrick, being that its his acting debut, didn’t want fans to really predict the type of role he chose.
“I don’t wanna be something that people predict. I wanted to be something out of the ordinary—something I could relate to,” Kendrick says. “A drug abuser—Laces. A hot head. A dude that’s ready to go, always on the take. It’s just a character I know growing up in Compton. You have relatives or dudes from around the corner that grew up in the neighborhood before you. And you just see these dudes walking around everyday—just on the go. And you grow this sort of love for them, in a weird way. You don’t wanna see nothing happen to them, but you know he’s dangerous.”
Watch the vignette below. Yeah, I need to see what happens, especially after the brief… uh… “appearance” from Fancy The Jamie Foxx Show kinda opened my eyes.
