On February 15, 1991, Warner Bros. released the horror-comedy Nothing but Trouble, directed by Dan Aykroyd. The film stars Chevy Chase as a businessman who agrees to drive an attractive lawyer he’s recently met—played by Demi Moore—to Atlantic City for a meeting. After taking a detour through a strange town, they get arrested and held captive by a vengeful elderly judge in a creepy backwoods mansion. Aykroyd plays dual roles as both the judge and his deformed grandson, as does John Candy, who appears as the arresting officer and the judge’s granddaughter.
Despite the undeniable star power involved, Nothing but Trouble was a notorious box office bomb, earning just over $8 million on a $40 million budget. Critics weren’t kind to it, either. Roger Ebert called it “one of the most cheerless and unpleasant times” he’d ever had at the movies. Hal Hinson, in his review for The Washington Post, wrote that Candy’s brief appearance wasn’t “brief enough for him not to disembowel his agent for allowing him to show his face” in the film.
But Candy wasn’t the only person who should’ve apparently been contemplating a disembowelment. A young, up-and-coming rapper/actor who was on the verge of superstardom also briefly appeared in Nothing but Trouble. Take a look at the scene below and see if you can spot the future hip-hop legend.
No, not Humpty Hump. We’re talking about the other guy dancing around in the New York Yankees jersey. That right there is rising rapper Tupac Shakur, making his acting debut. In the context of the movie, Shakur and Digital Underground—the Oakland, California-based rap group he was a member of at the time—are brought in front of Aykroyd’s geriatric judge for speeding. When asked to prove themselves as musicians, they perform “Same Song,” as seen in the clip above.
Shakur wouldn’t release his first solo album, 2Pacalypse Now, until nine months later. His breakout movie role came the following year, when he played Roland Bishop in Juice, alongside Omar Epps. He’d appear in just five more films before his death on September 13, 1996.
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