Ice-T, the controversial gangsta rapper, intimidating? Stop it.
“I ain’t all that, I’m not like that at all,” he says. “I’m laid back and I’m cool.”
Ice, vilified by law enforcement officers around the country for his 1992 song “Cop Killer,” has for years had a reputation for being hard-core. A former gang-banger, he typified the violent style of rap both as a solo artist and with his thrash-metal group, Body Count.
He brought that image to the big and small screen, with villainous roles in movies like “Ricochet” and “Trespass,” and on television in “New York Undercover” and “Swift Justice.”
But the hard-core truth? Ice is a pussycat. Well, not strictly a pussycat.
“I don’t raise my voice, I don’t yell at people,” Ice says. “(But) I’m the kind of person that if I were to get angry, somebody done (messed) up. And if you were my homey and you knew me, and something got me mad, it would make you mad. You’d be like, `Who the (hell) got Ice mad?”
It is the fun-loving, happy-go-lucky Ice that viewers see each week on “Players,” NBC’s lighthearted Friday night action series that airs at 7 p.m. on WMAQ-Ch. 5.
Still not convinced that Ice is your cup of tea? Listen to his idea of a normal day:
“We’d start off just talking about life. And then you might get into something like homelessness, and I might get real serious. And then I’d say let’s play (Sony) PlayStation, and we’d get down like that. And then somebody might call on the phone and say `Yo, Ice, your boy just got killed,’ and then we’d get serious.”
Sounds like a day in the country, huh?
Maybe some people still can’t see Ice as a guy who might take in a Woody Allen film festival, which could be a reason why “Players,” in which he plays one of three ex-criminals who use their street knowledge to find justice, is struggling in the ratings. But NBC is a believer, recently ordering additional episodes of the series,
Ice is one of the creators of “Players,” which also stars Costas Mandylor of “Picket Fences,” Frank John Hughes, who’s appeared on “Homicide,” and Mia Korf (“Party of Five”).
When he found himself enjoying playing vicious drug dealer Danny Cort on “New York Undercover,” Ice decided he’d give more television work a try. He had an idea for a movie version of “Players” which was much more “radical”–and more violent (“My guys were killing people and everything,” he laughs). But the concept fascinated him nonetheless.
“I was doing `New Jack City,’ and at the time I was really concerned about having to play a cop,” says Ice. “And I was like, `Why do I have to be a cop? Can’t I just be somebody that wants to right wrong?’ And somebody just said to me, `In order to fight crime, you have to be a policeman, or a superhero.’
“And my mind was like, what if a criminal really wanted to fight crime? Wouldn’t they be better at it? And I said, what if a criminal went up against a criminal with criminal techniques? And that’s where I started coming up with the concept.”
Ice took the idea of crooks fighting against crooks to Dick Wolf, whom he worked for on “Undercover” and the UPN series “Swift Justice.” Wolf liked the idea, and got it pushed through the NBC brass.
Ice says he’s having fun on the series, because the character is “100 percent” him.
“I said to myself, what would be a show that I would like to do? To be a player. All we do is ride around in sports cars, walk though mansions, it’s girls on the set everyday, I’m wearing the flyest clothes, jewelry. I mean, c’mon.”
It sure beats working for a living, as he thinks it might be on the syndicated action series “Soldier of Fortune Inc.”
“I don’t know if I’d want to do that for five years. Run around in the mud, dumping people off cliffs . I could pull this show (`Players’) off. It’s like being on `Dynasty’ for five years.”
Ice hopes viewers will enjoy a lighthearted action series along the lines of another show he used to watch:
“To me, this show has about the intensity of something like `MacGyver’ or `Hart to Hart’ or something. I used to watch `MacGyver’ sometimes just because it was light, and everything else was heavy on TV. And I just wanted to see something that didn’t get me caught up in some real, heavy, radical, emotional thing.”
Ice-T used to watch “MacGyver”?
– Where’s the remote: “Birdcage” star Nathan Lane, on whom NBC bestowed a 13-episode sitcom commitment for this coming fall, gets to warm up with a special appearance on the network’s “Mad About You” at 7 p.m. Tuesday on WMAQ-Ch. 5. In the episode, Lane will be reunited with “Birdcage” co-star and recurring “Mad” performer Hank Azaria, who plays Nat, the walker for Buchman family dog Murray.
