The Christian Post's 10 most-read stories of 2022
7. Actor Chris Tucker turns down over $10 million for movie role over religious objections to content
Rapper and actor Ice Cube revealed that fellow actor Chris Tucker, known for starring alongside Ice Cube in “Friday” and collaborating with action star Jackie Chan in the “Rush Hour” trilogy, declined to appear in one of the sequels to “Friday” because of religious objections to the content in the film.
“We were ready to pay Chris Tucker $10-12m to do ‘Next Friday’ but he turned us down for religious reasons,” Ice Cube recalled in a tweet. “He didn’t want to cuss or smoke weed on camera anymore.”
Tucker himself elaborated on how his opposition to the promotion of marijuana played a role in his turning down the offer to appear in “Next Friday” in a November 2021 interview with All Urban Central: “Back then, I gotta tell you, one of the reasons why I didn’t do the second one was because of the weed. Because I said, man, that movie became a phenomenon. I don’t want everybody smoking weed — and I never really told people this because I kind of forgot about it, but it was one of the reasons why I didn’t do it.”
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“I said, ‘I don’t wanna represent everybody smoking weed,’” he asserted. “And that’s one of the reasons why I said, ‘Nah.’ I didn’t want to keep doing that character.”
Tucker has repeatedly brought up his faith in media appearances, telling Piers Morgan in 2018 that he prayed for then-President Donald Trump and cited his Christian faith as the reason why he returned to stand-up comedy while seeking to “dig deeper to find something that’s still funny and not raunchy.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
