A PERFECT FIT -
ANDRE BENJAMIN TEACHES AUDIENCES HOW TO BE COOL
He may have started out as one-half of the critically-acclaimed hip-hop duo Outkast, but André Benjamin was tailor-made for Hollywood. From his suave sartorial style to the larger-than-life persona he brings to music videos such as the ubiquitous “Hey Ya,” the artist occasionally known as André 3000 may be music’s most distinctive talent since Prince, and his star seems destined to burn even brighter once audiences get a gander at his debut big screen performance in Be Cool, the long-awaited sequel to Get Shorty. We recently caught up with Benjamin in Beverly Hills to pick his brain on everything from acting opposite Hollywood heavyweights like Harvey Keitel and John Travolta to what role music plays in his future career plans.
Did you have any reservations about playing a gangster rapper given the fact that your own music doesn’t have any of those elements?
I’ve known [director F Gary Gray] since our first album , and if you know the history of Outkast, we’ve gone through a lot of changes. Back then I was a knucklehead just like everybody else, fresh out of high school, doing the dastardly deeds. Gary directed the "Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik" video, and the next time we worked with him was the “Ms. Jackson” video. I was doing the close-up scenes and he was looking at the playback monitor. He said, “I think you’re going to have a great career in film if you ever go in that direction, so if something comes up, you know I’ll look out for you.” He called me with the Be Cool script and I thought the story was great. But I didn’t like my character, so I told him I had to turn it down. I knew I wanted to get into films, but didn’t want to play a rapper, because that’s the obvious thing to do. So he said, “Let’s have a meeting and talk about it,” So I went to a hotel, we sat down and he said, “You’re playing a rapper, but you’re playing against type. People don’t see you as that, and you’re really playing a parody of what people think rap is.” It was way over the top – baggy pants down to your knees, four or five pagers, and all these platinum chains and stuff– and he was like, “Try it out!” On top of that, how the hell can you turn down being in a movie with these people?!
Gary said that this character started off with no name and one line. How did you build and embellish it?
It wasn’t one line – it was three or four – but Gary said, “I’ll make it better.” We had a conversation after I read the script where he just asked me questions, like, “Where is Dabu from? Why does he act like this?’ We made up a back-story, where I said I was from the south and sell records out of my trunk. Cedric the Entertainer's character saw us perform, saw a little talent in the ‘hood, and he said, “I’ll be your producer, I’ll make you national.” When that happens, which it does in music, that’s your man for life. You’ll do anything for that person ‘cause they got you out of the gutter. If you never had anything, once you get it you want everybody to know, so you get all the chains, beepers and pagers. So that’s how the character was created.
What was it like to be in a movie with all these great people? Who did you look forward to working with most?
I was excited to see Harvey Keitel. I’ve been a fan of John Travolta since I was little, way back to Welcome Back Kotter. Uma (Thurman), for sure, and Vince Vaughn was always funny to me. But you got to imagine, I’m a beginner and show up to work with all these people, so I was really timid and tiptoed through it, trying not to make mistakes. I had to ease into it and just sit down and talk to John (Travolta) and see that he’s a normal person, talking about flying airplanes and houses and all this type of stuff. And then Cedric, man, we tripped the whole movie! You get around these people and they become like a little family, then you just get into it and do your scenes and don’t think about. That’s the best way to do it.
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March 2005
