For 50 Cent’s latest Hollywood outing, the rapper says he draws on his own experiences to enhance his performance in new film, Home of the Brave.
While acknowledging that the shootings and stabbings he has survived growing up in New York are a far stretch from staying alive in a war-torn country like Iraq, 50 says he empathizes with what the soldiers go through.
“They don’t report back every casualty in a war… and somebody dies every day. They don’t report that back at home, you know what I mean? But that’s the way it is,” he told the Associated Press in a recent interview.
“So, can you imagine waking up in the morning, coming back, and somebody’s not in the bunk next to you? Your imagination says, ‘one of these days’. You have to take into account that it’s happening all around you, that one day your bunk is going to be empty; that you will be the person that don’t make it back.”
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“I believe that would change a person’s spirit,” said 50. “I don’t believe they come back exactly the same person, whether they actually killed, themselves, or they just was around killing while it was going on… I believe your spirit changes with that much death around you.”
The independent film has just finished primary filming in Spokane, Washington, and is the first movie to focus on the Iraq war and the difficulties faced by the military in the transition from battlefield to homefront.
Starring alongside Samuel L. Jackson, Jessica Biel, Christina Ricci and Brian Presley, 50 plays a soldier who faces the challenges of returning to civilian life at home. He went on to tell how his street persona has helped him in his pursuit of a movie career.
“In the environment that I come from, you have to be aggressive enough to actually get by,” he said. “Me, I had to be two peole: I had to be aggressive enough to get by in the neighbourhood and then my grandma’s baby in the house.”
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“People who meet me, it’s common that they say, ‘Well, you aren’t exactly what I expected you to be.’ And I go, ‘Well, sorry if I let you down, that I didn’t shoot you!’”
Home of the Brave is scheduled for release at the end of the year.
