It’s hard to get taken seriously if your name is Ludacris. That’s why the rap star, following the path of Ice Cube, Andre 3000 and 50 Cent, is checking his stage name at the door as he pursues a second career as a Hollywood actor.
“This is a different business, and I do want to be taken seriously, so it’s back to being Chris Bridges,” said the 31-year-old whose name appears in the credits of two films in October, “RocknRolla” and “Max Payne,” opening Friday.
The Atlanta-based rapper’s sixth album, “Theater of the Mind,” drops Tuesday, but the three-time Grammy winner said his priority is learning the rhyme and reason of Hollywood.
“I can see a point where acting is my full-time job, really,” Bridges said. “I will always be involved in music, but it may be more behind the scenes, as a producer, I will always do that. But when I look at 10 years from now, I don’t think rapping is necessarily what I want to do when I’m in my 40s. My focus is film.”
“Max Payne” has Bridges playing opposite Mark Wahlberg, who also started his career in music. Bridges jumped at the chance to play Jim Bravura, a calculating internal affairs officer. The film is an adaptation of the video game. The film “has the game as a loose blueprint,” Bridges said, but it goes well beyond it in telling the nihilistic tale of DEA agent Payne (Wahlberg), who is on a blood quest after his family is murdered.
In the video game, Bravura was an aging white lawman, but “Max Payne” director John Moore said he wanted to take the role to a different place. Why? Partly because it let him work with Bridges, whom the filmmaker had tried to cast in the 2004 film “Flight of the Phoenix.”
“I wanted to get him then, but Chris is a pretty busy guy,” Moore said. “If you look at the films he’s done so far, he really catches your eye in all of them. There’s nothing contrived about his performances.”
Rap stars often end up portraying criminals on screen, Bridges said, so he is happy to have gotten the role.
“I feel like I’m moving forward in a strong way,” he said. “I’m really ready to prove myself and move to the next level.”
