Actress Thandiwe Newton stopped by the Jennifer Hudson show and reflected on her friendship with Tupac Shakur.
Newton, 53, told host Jennifer Hudson about their time working together on the 1997 movie Gridlock’d.
“I was from England, and I didn’t know much about rap or spoken word,” Newton said on the January 5 episode. “And I arrived on set, and I’d done my research, and I’d seen him in movies. I was like, ‘What a great actor this guy is.’”
She mentioned that on set she would frequently stop by his trailer and joke with him about his tattoos.
“Because I just didn’t have any clue and I’m like, ‘What is that?’ Apparently it was a crucifix and I’m like, It looks like a penis and balls,” Newton said. “I could tell at first he’s like wanting to get really cross, and then he just laughed and laughed and laughed.”
Newtown added that she witnessed the “Hail Mary” rapper deal with serious issues pertaining to his family. She saw him cut his cousin’s “allowance” after she had a drug relapse. He also gave money to other relatives per her account. “I would just look at him and be like, ‘Geez, you’ve got so much responsibility, man. You’re looking after a whole extended family,’” Newton said. “And that’s just not what people thought of him as.”
Newton noted that Shakur was a “beautiful, caring poet,” even when he was just speaking. She also remembered Tupac telling her and Gridlock’d co-star Tim Roth about when he was shot in New York’s Quad Studios in 1994.
“He told us about being shot at close range and how it felt…for an elevator door to open and there’s a man standing there and he shoots at you five times and you are hit, hit, hit, hit,” Newton continued. “Tim and I just sort of sat barely able to breathe because this is a young man talking about nearly dying.”
“So when they said that it happened again,” Newton tearfully remembered, referencing the second time Tupac was shot some two years later. “It was just really hard. ‘Cause I heard him talk about how frightened he was. So I just knew that when it happened again, he must have been so frightened. And I loved him.”