![]() ![]() Gary Gray was involved, I didn’t know all of those details, I just looked at Eazy-E and N.W.A as this could be potentially my ticket to change my life. Before I ever found out the magnitude, that it’s a Universal project, and F. I got to go from a drug dealer to an icon who gets to go to the White House to dying of AIDS. “It felt like I could really show all my creative guns,” he said. The N.W.A story is way too powerful to be distracted by some celebrity emulating or pretending to be another celebrity.”įrom the moment he first learned of the role, Mitchell began preparing, immediately convinced of the potential scale of the role both for his career as an actor and for himself. “It all but demanded that it had to be new faces. ![]() “I was very deliberate in my approach to casting the movie,” Gray said. Gary Gray explained in a recent episode of the podcast “The Call-In,” hosted by “Selma” director Ava DuVernay, about the thinking behind his decision to cast unknown actors in the film’s key roles. is the son of N.W.A member Ice Cube but makes his acting debut in the film.) “Straight Outta Compton” director F. My best friend was killed in 2007, and that’s where I started thinking, ‘I’m just going to find something different to do.’ And it took me a little while, but then I found acting school.”Īll five members of N.W.A are cast with unknowns. “And I started seeing a lot of things happen, things that were too close to home, and I thought that’s not really what I want for myself. I was also in the drug scene,” Mitchell says. “We had to start over.”įor him that meant a series of jobs, including cook, electrician and oyster shucker. “We lost everything pretty much,” he says. Then, around the time he was graduating high school, Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. It was around middle school that the family settled in New Orleans, where his mother had been raised. Mitchell’s mother had a career in the Army, and so the early part of his life was spent tagging along with her and his siblings as they moved about the globe. I just wanted to do something I felt was expressive.” I didn’t think talking to somebody about my problems and me paying you for that is going to bring me any less stress. “I just wanted to see if I could find my own therapy. “I figured it would have a different type of people than what I was used to,” he says of his decision to turn to acting. Raised in New Orleans, he started acting only some five years ago, but Mitchell notes with pride that his very first time on a film set, for the dramatic thriller “Texas Killing Fields,” he had a speaking part. Though it’s not the first film role for 28-year-old Jason Mitchell, it is by far his biggest. In scene after scene, the rise, fall and eventual death of Eazy-E provides the film with an emotional core, as his street-hustler smarts and showman’s acumen help guide the group to dazzling heights. ‘Eazy’ does it for ‘Straight Outta Compton’s’ Jason MitchellĪs audiences were leaving “Straight Outta Compton” on its $60.2 million opening weekend, many were asking about the unknown actor playing N.W.A member Eric “Eazy-E” Wright. ![]()
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