Friday is an indisputable classic, but some of the actors who helped make the 90s film what it is are claiming they didn’t get paid what they deserved.
Faizon Love, who played Big Worm in the original movie, talked to Comedy Hype and said that he didn’t reprise his role in the sequel because he was only paid $2,500 for the original, and offered double that to reprise the role. That rubbed Ice Cube the wrong way, who quote tweeted the article and said that everyone was paid to scale.
“I didn’t rob no fuckin body,” Cube began. “The 1995 Friday movie cost $2.3m to make. Shot it in 20 days. Fazion worked 1 day, maybe 2. All the actors got paid scale to do the movie. They could’ve simple said ‘No’ but they didn’t. So miss me with that shit…”
Someone else brought up that Chris Tucker didn’t appear in the sequel, Friday After Next, as well, to which Cube responded that his Friday co-star turned down the millions that they offered him for religious reasons.
We were ready to pay Chris Tucker $10-12m to do Next Friday but he turned us down for religious reasons,” Cube wrote. “He didn’t want to cuss or smoke weed on camera anymore.”
Tucker confirmed as much in a recent interview.
“Back then, I gotta tell you, one of the reasons why I didn’t do the second one was because of the weed,” he said. “Because I said, man, that movie became a phenomenon. I don’t want everybody smoking weed and I never really told people this because I kind of forgot about it, but it was one of the reasons why I didn’t do it. Because I said, I don’t wanna represent everybody smoking weed.”
