There are countless rappers who have tried their hands at acting over the years. Some of them have arguably been more successful on the big screen than they were in the booth. Queen Latifah and Will Smith are both equally as lauded for their work in the booth and as leading actors. Then, there are artists who were far better at making music than they were at acting, like Nas in Belly.
Gucci Mane was one of those rare artists who happened to exist in both lanes. Back in 2013, he starred in Harmony Korine’s critically acclaimed Spring Breakers. There, he acted side by side with James Franco, Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, and more. Gucci was weirdly magnetic on screen, with the same kind of wheezy charisma that made him an irresistible rapper.
However, Gucci Mane never did explore more roles on the big screen. What made Harmony Korine such an alluring pick? Ultimately, he felt like the stars aligned for the kind of character he wanted to play.
In a 2013 interview with Vulture, he admitted that acting had been on his mind previously. But really, he wanted to play a character that mirrored him slightly but allowed him to really lean into a seedy villain archetype.
Gucci Mane on The Time He Acted in The Incredible ‘Spring Breakers’
“I had given thought to acting, but I never really had a good enough opportunity or a character who made sense and paralleled my life a little bit. I feel like I’m one of the poster boys for a bad guy in a movie. I feel like I’m a good person to play a bad guy in a movie… The enemy of the bad guy. The worst of the bad guys, and that’s exactly what [Archie] was. That intrigued me,” Gucci Mane explained.
Additionally, the Atlanta legend lauded Harmony Korine’s ability to humanize his environment. It’s not all dour guns and drugs. Instead, he chose to explore the humanity in his characters. For Gucci, he found that most evident through Spring Breakers‘ sense of humor.
“In the South, you know how to be creative, you know how to make something out of nothing, you know how to make the most of the situation that just comes with from where we at. You gotta make something out of what you got. Sometimes you almost have to laugh to keep from crying to deal with the pain associated with the hood,” Gucci Mane explained.
“And I feel like James Franco — drugs are serious; guns are serious; killing, murdering, shooting, everything is serious — he brought a type of humor to it that does live in the hood.”
Photo by Johnny Nunez/WireImage
The post The Time Gucci Mane Tried to Become an Actor in One of the Most Critically Acclaimed Films of 2013 appeared first on VICE.
