‘Bad Boys’ star Will Smith took over Hollywood as hip-hop took over the world

“Bad Boys: Ride or Die” hitting the screens this week is a reminder that just a few months ago, the son of a certain rapper-turned-actor revealed an amusing ignorance of the career trajectory of “Bad Boys” co-lead Will Smith. In a viral late-2023 video, King Harris and his father, the rapper T.I., were responding to the question: Who is the “GOAT actor turned rapper?” When T.I. says at one point, “Will Smith — can’t forget Will,” his son, in all sincerity, responds, “He a rapper?”

“Will Smith won the first Grammy,” the exasperated father explains. “As a rapper. He was the first rapper to ever win a Grammy, bruh. He’s the one that opened the door for rappers to come in, go to the Grammys and stunt.”

King Harris obviously wasn’t watching in 2020 when “Bad Boys for Life,” the third film in the buddy-cop franchise, was about to be released and “Sway in the Morning” host Sway Calloway persuaded Smith to perform the breathless delivery of “Brand New Funk.” That’s the lead single from DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince’s sophomore album called — wait for it, young Harris — “He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper.” T.I.’s son must have also missed Smith’s appearance on NBC’s “Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon” that same year when he and Fallon rapped “The History of Will Smith,” chronicling Smith’s career arc from his debut single, “Girls Ain’t Nothing But Trouble,” to his No. 1 hit “Getting’ Jiggy Wit It” through his roles in “Six Degrees of Separation,” “Men in Black” and “Independence Day.”

The question that prompted T.I.’s conversation with his son — who is the greatest rapper-turned-actor of all time? — is itself an acknowledgment that hip-hop has been a launchpad for so many actors. After assessing the careers of, say, Queen Latifah, Ice-T, LL Cool J, Ice Cube, Tupac, Eve, DMX, Bow Wow, Mos Def (Yasiin Bey), Common, Ludacris and 50 Cent, one wonders: Are you really a hip-hop star if you’ve never landed a big acting role?

The acting landscape would be more barren if some of those listed above hadn’t put down their pens for somebody else’s script. We’ve seen Queen Latifah play the defiant bank robber Cleo in “Set It Off,” “Empress of the Blues” Bessie Smith in “Bessie,” Ursula in “The Little Mermaid” and Matron Mama Morton in “Chicago.” We saw the late Tupac Shakur in “Poetic Justice” and “Juice,” and T.I. play an escapee who joins the Union Army in the 2016 remake of “Roots.” Then there was Mos Def in the films “16 Blocks” and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and as Booth (opposite Jeffrey Wright’s Lincoln) in the Broadway production of “Topdog/Underdog.”

Not everyone has applauded the trend. In 2002, the actor Samuel L. Jackson fumed that he wouldn’t even read a script if he knew a star role had been reserved for a rapper. He called it an insult. However, he did make an exception. He noted that Smith’s 2001 portrayal of boxing icon Muhammad Ali “takes him out of that Fresh-Prince-is-saving-the-world-as-an-Air-Force-pilot thing and gives him some credibility as an actor.”

At that point, Jackson had already acted alongside Busta Rhymes in the 2000 remake of “Shaft,” and the next year he appeared in “S.W.A.T.” with LL Cool J. Those castings and a filmography that includes “Snakes on a Plane” makes Jackson’s high-mindedness ring a bit hollow.

There were an untold number of discussions last year about the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, but Smith’s return to the big screen around its 51st anniversary is another illustration that hip-hop has influenced Hollywood just as much as it has influenced music, dance and fashion.

Todd Boyd, a professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Southern California who recently wrote “Rapper’s Deluxe: How Hip Hop Made the World,” said Thursday that the transition of hip-hop stars to the screen is less surprising when we acknowledge that they were acting even as hip-hop artists. “Rappers are known for playing a persona,” he said, “which is why so many rappers are known by names other than their government names.”

One irony is that in a music genre that reliably critiques law enforcement, some of those artists honed personas that clash sharply with their on-screen characters. Ice-T, for example, embraced a gangster/pimp persona as a rapper. He went on to play an NYPD detective in the 1991 film “New Jack City” and has played Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola on NBC’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” for more than 23 years.

Ice Cube, with fellow members of N.W.A, invited the attention of the FBI with 1988’s caustic “F— tha Police.” Now he’s a producer of mostly family-friendly movies, and in one of those movies, 2014’s “Ride Along,” he plays a police officer alongside comedian Kevin Hart as a security guard.

Or maybe it isn’t ironic. If we think of the “keeping it real” ethos of hip-hop as being, in Boyd’s words, more about “realism” than reporting, then we can think of them as actors in the recording booth who began acting on the screen. “If you interpret what people are saying literally, then that’s one thing,” Boyd said. “But actors play different characters from project to project. So, you know, if you’re going to be a successful actor, you have to be comfortable playing different characters in different films.”

To watch “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” from its debut in 1990 to its finale in 1996 is to marvel at Smith’s transformation from a rapper gifted a TV show into an actor serious about the craft. Not only was he in the process of moving into the so-called mainstream, Smith, who won an Oscar for best actor in 2022, was kicking open that door to the mainstream that other rappers poured through.

It’s not just limited to the movies, though. “Hip-hop at the Super Bowl, hip-hop at the Met Gala, hip-hop at Paris Fashion Week,” Boyd said, as he listed some of the moments he covers in his book. “Jay-Z and Beyoncé doing Tiffany ads with a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting in the commercial; Nas performing at the Kennedy Center with the National Symphony Orchestra; Kendrick Lamar winning a Pulitzer Prize — nobody would have thought of any of these things.”

And certainly no one could have imagined back then that the jokester who gave us “Parents Just Don’t Understand” and “I Think I Can Beat Mike Tyson” would become such a huge box office draw that his past as a rapper would come as a shock to later generations.