Dennis Quaid appeared on the PBD Podcast and talked about the time he starred opposite 2Pac, James Belushi and James Earl Jones in the 1997 movie Gang Related.
“That was so great,” the actor said of working with the rapper. “I was kinda familiar with 2Pac when we did that movie. We both loved Chinese food, it turns out. So, he and I would be in the trailer, like, every day. We had Chinese food five days in a row.”
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“At the time, I really didn’t know much about who he was,” Quaid continued. “I knew who he was, but it’s like we got in there and we talked about acting, we talked about growing up, we talked about our mothers. He had such a great heart. He was such a talented actor too and he had a thirst to learn.”
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“I didn’t know he was a poet, really, because that’s what he was. He told the story of how they tried to kill him before in New York, and it was hysterical the way he told it, but it was, like, for real. Then six months later he got killed,” he shared as his emotions started to get the best of him. “That one really hit me hard. It really did.”
Quaid then highlighted how vulnerable Pac was, and how much he could’ve given to the world: “He had so much to give the world, he really did. He would’ve wound up being such a uniter of people.”
The actor later added, “He was just a human being. He was a kid and he was a vulnerable person. He wasn’t like this ‘gangster,’ this, or that, or the other. He had a poet’s heart … It was his vulnerability and he had this curiosity about other people, including me. You never put the two of us together, eating Chinese food in a trailer. But there we were.”
Gang Related was one of several movies released posthumously after 2Pac’s September 1996 death; Gridlock’d, in which he starred alongside Tim Roth, arrived in January 1997.
Watch Quaid discuss the late rapper on the PBD Podcast below:
