But as they soon learn, once they begin their mission to get off smack via public detoxification programs, getting help getting clean is harder than just getting clean. With a hospitalized Cookie in critical condition, Spoon decides to give up the needle, urging his pal Stretch to “kick” along with him. After a successful performance, they convene back to their place to take in some celebratory heroin, which junkies Spoon and Stretch easily consume and novice Cookie overdoses on. He plays Spoon, a rapping bass player who’s part of a jazz trio/thruple with keyboardist Stretch (a young Tim Roth) and spoken-word songstress Cookie (an even younger Thandiwe Newton). Before he went to jail, he played the heavy in the 1994 basketball drama Above the Rim, one of the many ’90s Black films whose soundtrack is still more popular than the film.Īlthough Shakur was getting the cold shoulder from Hollywood post-release, he triumphantly got one of the leads in Gridlock’d, playing a role Laurence Fishburne and others passed on. Between a brief jail stint for sexual abuse charges and making music for then-gangsta rap empire Death Row Records, there were a couple of years there when the young MC-who gave impressive performances in Juice (as a murderous teen) and Poetic Justice (as Janet Jackson’s love interest)-didn’t have time to be an on-the-rise thespian. Gridlock’d was supposed to be Shakur’s return to the big screen. (There was also a film he did with Mickey Rourke, a shelved crime flick called Bullet, that went straight to video shortly after his death.) While his final film, the cop thriller Gang Related, wouldn’t get released until later that October, his penultimate, posthumous film Gridlock’d was ready to go that January.

Famed rapper/actor Tupac Shakur (better known as 2Pac), whose life was unfortunately cut short a few months before as a result of gunshot wounds from a drive-by shooting that’s still unsolved to this day, had a couple films that had not yet hit theaters when he died.

Gridlock movie