Years before she became a rap heavyweight, Nicki Minaj had dreams of becoming an actress. The Queens multi-hyphenate actually studied the art while attending LaGaurdia High School in NYC and has since appeared in films like Barbershop: The Next Cut, Ice Age: Continental Drift, and The Other Woman. Although she once claimed acting was her “first love,” Nicki recently told Karen Civil she may ditch the movie biz for good.
“Even with having a tiny role you may be on set for a couple of weeks, and then you have to do promotions for it and leading up to the film you have to do fittings and stuff, so it takes a pretty long time, so I don’t think I’ll ever do that again,” she said during a BET Digital special. “I realized that maybe it’s not in me like rap is in me. With rap, it’s different, no matter how long it takes I’m willing to do it. I just don’t have that same passion.”
The four-part interview special, aptly titled A Night With the Queen, premieres at 9 p.m. ET Friday on BET.com. The sit-down will touch on everything from Nicki’s recently released Queen album to her newly launched Beats 1 radio show.
“People don’t know that quietly my fans, and I have been doing our own secret radio show for years,” she said. “Sometimes what I would do was just call into the secret radio show that my fans would do, and we would talk, and no one would know that we did that for a year...but now we’re in the big leagues. I’m one of those people who doesn’t like addressing things really, but people talk about me all the time and lie about me. It’s not fair, and it’s not happening anymore. Now with Queen Radio, it’s just like [if] n***as got something to say, I got something to say, too.”
Nicki will continue her promotional run for Queen this weekend, when she appears on DJ Whoo Kid’s SiriusXM radio show. The “Chun-Li” rapper will address a wide range of topics, including her collaboration with the Weeknd (“Thought I Knew You”), the time she and Beyoncé debated T.I., and the real reason Drake didn’t appear on Queen.
“Drake and I were working on something. We were working on something, but I didn’t want to change the date of the album,” she told Whoo Kid. “About two days before I had to turn [the album] in, he and I had been going back and forth.... He had come to my studio—we found something that we really, really loved—but he was also going through that process of getting stuff right for his tour, and I had to understand that.... As an artist I always try to put myself in the artist’s shoes and not try to be selfish.”
The Whoollywood Shuffle interview airs at noon ET this Saturday.
