He insists on being called Curtis Jackson. Apparently, 50 Cent or Fiddy is what you get to call him if you’re a friend. Well that’s the line that the musician, actor and soon-to-be children’s author was peddling at the Aruba International Film Festival where his latest project, Things Fall Apart, had its international premiere.
There is a huge difference between the man of today and the rapper who exploded into international public consciousness as 50 Cent in 2003. His album Get Rich or Die Tryin’ sold 12 million copies with its upbeat tempo music overlaid by aggressive lyrics that were said to derive from 50 Cent’s rough upbringing.
Immediately, the man born Curtis James Jackson III in Queens, New York, became a divisive figure. Some, such as Spike Lee, criticised the perceived glorification of thug life, where money was everything, and the associated macho culture. Jackson engaged in a number of feuds, known as beefs, with fellow rappers including Ja Rule and Fat Joe, which kept his name constantly in the papers and ensured the spread of his reputation.
Yet sitting before me in the executive lounge of an Aruba hotel is a softly spoken, suited man, more happy talking about his business enterprises than he is about his feuds, his teenage years selling drugs and the incident that saw him shot eight times at point-blank range. The only item that lives up to anything like a bling rap star image is his sunglasses, the frame of which is made up of a gold-plated wildcat.
Jackson suggests that he may have been misunderstood in the past, in any case. He says: “The materialism aspect of Get Rich or Die Tryin’ really does depend on the perspective that you view the name of the album. You can think the statement is literally about money or you think it’s a statement about ambition; you are going to win, or die in the process. That is just saying that you want to make it at the highest level possible by utilising the philosophy that I’m going to get rich or die trying.”
One thing that the 35-year-old no longer has to worry about is money. He put in US$2 million (Dh7.4m) of his own money to make Things Fall Apart, in which he plays a promising American football player from a poor background who dreams of making it as a professional but is told that he has an aggressive form of cancer. Jackson lost 60lb (27kg) to play the cancer victim and is almost unrecognisable as the man who appeared showing off his muscled torso on the cover of his debut album.
As with that album, the film is inspired by personal experience. He says: “My best friend growing up is what inspired me to do this story. I would probably have had to be approached by a major studio and been given lots of money to do this tale otherwise, because of the amount of weight that I had to lose to play someone with cancer. If you look at Tom Hanks in Philadelphia and Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, there was a larger period of time for them to lose the weight because there was a budget provided for them to take a break from making the film and then to come back. Even if you are fasting and you are not eating at all, it would take longer than the nine weeks it took to lose 60lb. I had to do physical training while I was fasting. I had to take a lot of electrolytes to make sure that I wasn’t getting dehydrated.”
Losing the weight was almost unbearable, and during the darkest moments Jackson would go online and read interviews with Hanks and Christian Bale, who slimmed down dramatically for his role in The Fighter, and draw comfort from knowing that they had been through the same sort of thing.