“Oh, Michael didn’t encourage that at all,” Chris Tucker tells me. That’s Michael as in Michael Jackson. The King of Pop. We had been talking about why Tucker is so selective about the work he puts out, and as he tells it, MJ was a dear friend who wished that Chris would work more. “He used to always say, ‘Let’s make history,'” says Tucker, casually affecting Jackson’s wispy lilt. “We want to see more of you Chris! What are you doing?”
Tucker rarely gives interviews. He lives in Las Vegas, but he’s in Los Angeles talking with me at the Four Seasons to promote the end of his longest sabbatical yet. Seven years or “that’s what they tell me,” he says, shrugging. The film is Air, Ben Affleck’s feelgood biopic revolving around the other iconic MJ. The film, loosely based off of Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog, chronicles the efforts of Knight and Sonny Vaccarro (Matt Damon) to land Michael Jordan at Nike. Tucker plays Howard White, a real-life executive in Nike’s then-fledgling basketball department, whom Jordan himself credits with being instrumental in swaying his decision to sign with the brand—so much so that Jordan said that White was a glaring omission when Affleck let him have an early look at the script to get his blessing.
“Why don’t you make movies?” Ben Affleck remembers asking Tucker while they got to know each other making Air. He’s laughing as he says it, but Tucker’s been getting a version of that question for the better part of two decades now. “I still don’t know why,” Affleck adds.
Tucker, however, is surprised by the perception that he doesn’t work. “It’s shocking because I guess I’m the last person to know it,” he says. “‘Cause I’m always working. Stand up comedy or something else, I’m working. So when they say that, I’m like, oh, okay. I guess I haven’t been on the big screen in a while.” There’s a noticeable emphasis on “big screen,” as if to say it’s far from the most important thing to him, but it’s clearly important to everyone else.
His rise at the turn of the century was swift: scene-stealing sets on Def Comedy Jam led to him inhaling joints with Ice Cube in Friday, backing up Bruce Willis in The Fifth Element, and outshining a peak Charlie Sheen in Money Talks, all within a three year-span. That accrued fame and notoriety crescendoed with Rush Hour, the action comedy that unlocked everything for Tucker.
His odd-couple chemistry with Jackie Chan took an otherwise fairly stock buddy-cop script and turned it into one of the most charming, hilarious films in the whole genre—with an enormous box office haul. The film was such a phenomenon that when Tucker was approached by New Line to do a sequel, he asked for $20 million—that’s Tom Cruise- Mission-Impossible-level money—and the studio didn’t even blink.
And then, after reaching A-list salary territory, Chris Tucker seemed to walk away from the industry.
Tucker’s retreat from the spotlight wasn’t entirely dissimilar to that of his friend and peer, Dave Chappelle. “I was around Dave at that time when he walked away from his show,” Tucker recalls. “We were supporting each other for a little period of time. I think it’s good when you can go away and have a life outside of the business a little bit—a lot of bit. Art imitates life. So you got to have a full life to do great work.”
“He’s the only guy I know who’s brilliant but has the discipline to actually do the thing all actors want to be able to do but can’t, whether it’s the allure of money or the desire to work,” Affleck says. “He has the discipline to say, ‘I don’t want to, I don’t like it.’ Period. People call him to do stuff all the time. The guy has turned down so much stuff because it just didn’t move him. He really is that authentic artist.”
In person, Tucker is quieter, more reserved and still than the often kinetic, boisterous and colorful characters he’s known for. To his mind, he hasn’t gone anywhere. “Everybody always says ‘you’re back,’” he says, shrugging. “But I don’t look at it that way. I’ve traveled the world ten times over. I’ve had relationships all over the world. I did a lot of humanitarian work all over the world. So I’m always busy, always learning and growing.”
(That last part isn’t an exaggeration—when I press Tucker on what keeps him busy besides playing golf with sheiks or making sure he never misses an All-Star Weekend, he mentions attending keynote speeches around the country at random, not to collect a check as the speaker, but to sit in the audience and take notes.)
“I’m a perfectionist,” Tucker insists. “I don’t like to do something that I think is going to be mediocre. I like to do the best.”
Tucker was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the youngest of six brothers and sisters. An early fascination with Eddie Murphy and Richard Pyror—plus a natural talent for getting laughs cutting up in class—inspired him to try stand-up, which quickly propelled him into the LA comedy circuit. Jokes like “I’m so broke, if a n-gga robbed me, it would just be for practice” quickly made him a favorite. Still, as steadily as his star was rising, Rush Hour quickly made his career go supernova.
After Rush Hour, Tucker owns up to his fair share of excess—but unlike some of his Hollywood peers, he hit the brakes before there was any real danger of a tailspin. “Oh man, I did it all. I did it all,” says Tucker. “Bought every car you can imagine, private planes, all that stuff. And that was all fun. But I knew there had to be something more. I knew I didn’t want to just make a whole bunch of money making movies that don’t really mean anything. I knew it wouldn’t make me happy.”
Tucker had already been showcasing the breadth of his range before Rush Hour (especially in the decidedly more dramatic Dead Presidents), but about an hour into the movie, you can see him becoming a star in real-time. He’s in the villain’s lair, opposite a blond and menacing Ken Leung and a handful of goons, and for the first time, the action briefly switches from a duet with Chan to a solo—and Tucker nails it, rattling off one-liners that feel like they definitely weren’t in the script, somehow managing to hilariously cower and plead—and then believably kick their asses with a healthy dose of shit-talking before Jackie Chan enters the fray.
In the post-Rush Hour afterglow, Tucker found himself totally disinterested in working just to solidify his name as a marquee fixture. He’d done the legwork, taking on everything from parts in Heavy D and 2Pac music videos to five minutes in a Tarantino film (a very memorable five minutes). Now that he was a bonafide star, a new, different kind of high was eluding him. “It got to a point that I wanted to only do special [roles] and those things weren’t coming to me—and I couldn’t find them,” he explains. “And I said, well, let me travel a little bit, live a little bit, instead of waiting on those things.”
So he traveled the world, broadening his perspectives, all the while discovering the mainstream appeal of Rush Hour suddenly became an international skeleton key, opening doors at the highest levels of fame, from the White House—President Bill Clinton, so endeared by a Chelsea Clinton name-drop Tucker ad-libbed in the film, began taking him along to all types of events here and abroad—to Neverland Ranch. “I was in New York for two days waiting to meet MJ,” Tucker recalls. “I took a private jet there. I said, well, I ain’t heard from him, I got to go. Took a private jet back to LA and as soon as I landed, I had a message: ‘Michael Jackson wants to meet you tomorrow morning.’ I was still on the plane. I went up to the captain and said, ‘I’ll pay you whatever you want to take me back to New York.’”
The end credits of Chris Tucker Live, his 2015 (and most recent) comedy special, show the fruits of his decades of higher learning: surfing the Gold Coast with his son, shooting the shit with Clinton on a tarmac, cutting up with sheiks in Abu Dhabi. But he maintains his pursuit of the perfect project never wavered. “I tell my agents to send me everything,” Tucker says. “I want to see it all, because there might be something good out there.”
What counts as “good” to Tucker? He says he looks for roles where he’ll “have a lot of freedom to be able to create within the script. And if I could feel some trust in who I’m working with—the director saying, ‘Hey, we’ll work it out. We’ll find it.’ If they give me that room, then let’s just do it.” Prior to this year, he’d only done two films that weren’t Rush Hours, both with Oscar-winning directors, David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook) and Ang Lee (Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk). What’s more, both directors reached out to him.
“There was a feeling of destiny about it,” David O. Russell tells me over email. “[At the time] we had not heard from him in cinema for a while. He was very ready to make something new and different—to show himself in a different world.” Silver Linings was Tucker’s first role post-Rush Hour where he wasn’t No. 1 on the call sheet, but he was attracted to the part nevertheless because it gave him an opportunity to flex different muscles. “He was very precise to inspire me as a writer to keep defining the character so that he really made an impact and delivered ‘for Chris’s fans’ as he put it,” Russell recalls. “Which meant right up through day one, I kept writing and showing Chris new pages to make it worthy for him, which of course also elevated the story as well.”
The gamble paid off, earning Tucker a SAG nomination for the film’s ensemble. It was enough to put him on Ang Lee’s radar a couple of years later, who cast him in his satirical war drama about a unit of young men surrounded by vulturous entertainment industry types eager to cash in on their story and ignore their blatant PTSD—except Tucker’s film producer, whose interest is genuine.
“Our movie was highly cynical, acerbic,” Lee tells me. “Chris brought two things. His funny bits are like a mirror, he exposes everything else around the boys for how ridiculous it all is. On the other hand, at the end, he’s the only one with goodwill to these people. The guy who actually cared about them. That brought warmth to the movie.”
“That’s a great contribution, to be funny and heartfelt and be genuine,” adds Lee. “It’s not like acting, he’s just making sure he hits the right lines and moments, but it’s genuine.”
In 2013, when both Ben Affleck and Chris Tucker were last on the awards circuit (for Argo and Silver Linings Playbook, respectively), the former pulled Chris aside and told him he’d love to work with him one day. At first, Tucker always assumed it was just Hollywood talk. And then Affleck presented him with Air, promising Tucker the freedom to improv that attracted him to roles. “Chris thinks I’m fucking around, but it’s true: I’ve been trying to work with the dude for 25 years,” Affleck swears.
He actually needed Tucker’s help. Jordan had blessed the film, but the inclusion of Howard White was one of his caveats—a man who, at that point, had little public record to build a character from. “The sense I got [from Michael] is, Howard was the person he could relate to and connect with,” Affleck says. Luckily for him, Tucker is sort of a Hollywood Forrest Gump who’s done it all, and he had actually developed a friendship with White over the years through his golf foundation.“I’d call Howard every year to beg him for Jordan bags and hats,” says Tucker. “And from there we would talk and check up on each other at least once a year.”
“It becomes a running theme when you talk to Chris, it doesn’t matter who you bring up,” Affleck says. “Chris is friends with them and has had some incredibly meaningful personal encounter.”
With a personal connection to the subject and the freedom to shape the part however he saw fit, Tucker got to work crafting what he says was “the hardest role” he’s ever played. “Rush Hour was pretty much me on steroids,” he says. “Friday, I was young. But for Air I had to really embody Howard’s spirit and get his dialect and then his personality. He’s a very friendly person, a positive person. I wanted to really get that across because everybody else in the movie is saying no. And Howard wouldn’t say that. He would be positive about it.”
Tucker took the performance seriously, and wrote all of Howard’s dialog scenes—or at least, dictated them to his son, “because you young guys are better with the computers.”
So the real Howard White let Tucker into his world, and his research was extensive: “Howard had me talking to people he played hopscotch with as a kid, his teacher, his high school coaches, friends, all the way up to him mentoring Charles Barkley. I got a lot of information and put it together to embody his spirit. Everybody I talked to said he’s a glass half full guy. They call him Confucius.”
“I think that he was a unifying force in that movie,” the real Howard White says of Tucker’s performance. “And it’s difficult to see. But it’s always been my mission in life to keep people positive, for MJ, for Nike. I was there to balance those tough moments with: ‘We’ll get through this.’”
So Tucker immersed himself in the part to study up. “Chris came to LA early and locked himself in his hotel for a week,” Affleck recalls. “That’s the only time that’s ever happened in my experience professionally, acting or directing. That’s why he was so fluid—all the ad-libs and throwaway lines are things he knew about Howard and picked up by osmosis. When you commit that kind of time and energy and you’re as brilliant as Chris is, that’s the result. He could just transition right into Howard.”
There’s a pivotal scene in Air—Nike’s big pitch to the Jordan family—where Howard arrives late, and James Jordan senior gives him shit for it: “Only brother in the room, and you late.”
It’s a scene the real Howard White told Tucker about, and White’s mere presence helped seal the deal. “I wanted to give that sense in the scene, that none of that would’ve happened without Howard,” Affleck says. “That Howard was the cultural bridge to Michael and more importantly to his family. Because these white guys didn’t know how to talk to or connect with him in the same way. And they relied on Howard, not just his background as an athlete or his ethnicity—the thing people all say about Howard is he’s just someone everybody likes. He’s witty. He’s charming. He’s the guy who, when you bring in the person you wanna sign, you want Howard there.”
Today, Tucker looks for roles that spread some kind of message of positivity. (Silver Linings is, at its core, a movie about bettering yourself.) But Tucker, a Christian, swears that the reports about his spirituality impacting his roles are a little exaggerated. Sure, he might not readily take a role that calls on him to be a stoner, or a profane gun-toting lackey spouting Tarantino-isms. But he isn’t as devout as most of the google searches would imply.
“A lot of my not cussing started when I had a son,” Tucker explains. “I heard my younger self on a tape cussing once, and just felt like I had to be better. And then it got out that people said I wasn’t cussing no more at all. They could believe whatever they want to believe, but it’s only going to make me better if I could be funny without cussing every two words. Funny is funny.”
Tucker says he didn’t turn down Next Friday because his faith dictated it, but more because he’s anti-sequel. “I was looking at it as an artist, like let me move on to the next thing and do that just as good,” he explains. And yet, Rush Hours 2, 3…and maybe a fourth? “It wasn’t the money, but it was just, nothing else was on my plate. And I love working with Jackie.” (“The crazy, crazy amount of money” didn’t hurt either, Tucker would add later.)
“Funny is funny” also captures Tucker’s opinion on some of his standup peers railing against wokeness and cancel culture these days. Tucker’s come a long way from his “pissed off” days of Def Comedy Jam—his last special debuted on Netflix in 2015, and was about the least offensive set from a comedian over 40 this past decade. “It’s my personality and my spirituality,” he explains. “I try not to do stuff that I regret later on in life. And some comedians, that’s their thing and I don’t knock them for it, but I think I look at things differently.”
Tucker says working on new standup material is what’s occupying most of his time now, as he’s fine-tuning his routine in smaller clubs before, ostensibly, launching a new special. And he sees Air as the beginning of a new era in his career. “I definitely want to work, I definitely want to work constantly now,” Tucker says. He claims he’s been developing all types of content with a slew of writers, producers, and directors. But developing what, exactly? He won’t say except that he’s looking to surprise everyone. (As for something that may seem obvious, like say, joining the Marvel machine? “It would have to be something that’s really unique and different,” Tucker says. “I wouldn’t want to step into something that’s already out there that’s established like, what is he doing playing Spider-Man?”
Tucker’s legend is solidified—a generation that grew up on Rush Hour will always revere him, and now, he’s back. “Andre 3000 just said to me yesterday, how we were the kids in the food court eating heroes, looking at Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, the Denzels,” he says. “And now we are looked at as those people that they call legends. I don’t know about all that, but that’s what people say. I’m like okay, well, thank you.”
“I got a lot more to do. But thank you.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Shaniqwa Jarvis
Styled by Jan-Michael Quammie at The Wall Group
Grooming by Tasha Reiko Brown at The Wall Group
Tailoring by Yelena Travkina
Production by Annee Elliot