Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

Rapper biopic tries to get at B.I.G. mystery

For more than a decade, the question has gone unanswered: Who murdered The Notorious B.I.G.?

“Notorious,” a biopic about the rapper that opens Jan. 16, tries to solve a different mystery: Who was he really, behind the image?

Like his friend and collaborator Sean “Diddy” Combs, he fashioned many different identities, reflecting the increasingly grandiose personas he adopted as his status rose.

Born Christopher Wallace, a poor kid and later a drug dealer, in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, he ascended in the East Coast hip-hop world of the 1990s under the pseudonyms Biggie Smalls, Big Poppa, and, finally, The Notorious B.I.G.

In 1997, a still-unsolved drive-by shooting took the 24-year-old’s life outside a Los Angeles party celebrating the Soul Train Music Awards given by Vibe magazine and Qwest Records.

Newcomer Jamal Woolard, who plays the heavyset rapper, says the central question of the movie is voiced by his future wife, R&B singer Faith Evans, played by Antonique Smith.

“So are you a bad guy trying to be good, or a good guy trying to be bad?” she asks.

Woolard’s character replies: “I’m just someone trying to make it.”

Wallace then surprises Evans, whom he had known for just nine days, with his own question: a marriage proposal.

“That part I played with the shield down,” says Woolard, 33, also a Brooklyn-born rapper (stage name Gravy). “This was love at first sight. This was the glitter and the glamour, a good girl gone wild in his imagination.”

The marriage was famously troubled, and the movie doesn’t shy away from that, he says, or from the rapper’s on-off relationship with fellow star Lil’ Kim (Naturi Naughton).

“Kim didn’t get both worlds. [Evans] did. She knew him at heart. And his mother [played by Angela Bassett] knew him. Those are the only two people that really knew Christopher.

“Forget Biggie, and forget everything else. Before he was successful, they knew the man he was inside.”

Wallace’s mother, Voletta, served as a producer, and Combs, played in the film by Derek Luke (“Glory Road”), is an executive producer. George Tillman Jr. (“Men of Honor”) directs.

The movie “is about manhood,” Woolard says. “It’s about a boy turning into a man, and that is Christopher becoming The Notorious B.I.G.”

Woolard never knew Wallace, though they grew up just blocks apart: “The funeral, that’s the closest I ever got to Big, sad to say.”

He believes Wallace would still be a musical innovator had lived.

“He’d be high up there. He’d be sitting on about a couple hundred mil. No discredit to the old-school rappers, but he took it to a whole other level — a luxurious lifestyle. He was the ghetto Shakespeare.”