Bow Wow, Brandon T Jackson, Naturi Naughton, Terry Crews and Ice Cube Lottery Ticket Press Conference
If you won $370 million, what would you do with it?Naturi Naughton: "That’s hard. That’s a lot of money. It’s too much. For me, I’m from Jersey and I grew up in the ‘hood. I might just be like, 'Oh, Jesus!' I really don’t know what I would do, but I know I would want to do something great."
Brandon T Jackson: "Honestly, one of my favorite movies is Titanic so I would order Leonardo DiCaprio to the ‘hood in Detroit, and I would have him re-enact it. I really don’t know what I would do. That’s too much money for one man to have, so I would just give back or give it away. The message in the movie says what we should do with it, but I don’t know."
What’s the best check that you’ve written since you made your money?
Terry Crews: "I was able to write a check to pay off my sister’s school bills. She’s a lawyer now. She’s an attorney and doing all that stuff. That felt really good. She is working with me, so it’s great. It’s all family business. That made it all work it."
Ice Cube, you’ve gone from NWA to Boyz in the ‘Hood to family films. Do you feel like you’ve come full circle?
Ice Cube: "I don’t know if I want to come full circle. I just want to keep going forward, and just keep doing what feels good and right. I feel like I’m a filmmaker, and ‘hood comedies are our specialty. People love them, so why should I not do them because I want to do something hard? I really use my records to have the freedom of that, but my movies are for the audience. We do them for everybody to enjoy them. If people want to see more family fare, that’s what we’re gonna give them. We're gonna be good at it, and we’re gonna try to be better than everybody else. We’re gonna find new talent. There’s a lot of untapped talent in our community and our world. People who don’t really get a big shot, I want to give them a big shot. That’s how I live, and we’ll keep going forward and not worry about what happened in the rearview mirror."
When you first became very successful, did your friends change and want something from you?
Ice Cube: "The first thing they tell you is, 'Don’t change.' But what you realize is that you don’t change that much. It’s everybody around you. You find yourself alienated. Everybody is talking about you before you get there, and you can feel it. It’s a whole different thing. Everybody that wants to be successful should always be careful of what you wish for. A lot of artists and entertainers want to put the genie back in the bottle and wish they could go back to being what they were. It’s not like that, so you’ve got to make that adjustment."
"What I decided was that, who was cool with me before I made the money was going to be cool with me now. Who wasn’t cool with me before I made this, I’m giving them problems all the time, like I was before. I was all, 'Don’t get nice on me now!' That’s how I approached it. I just made sure I stayed myself. I didn’t want to go Jack-in-the-Box. I just wanted to stay myself. That’s what I did and it all worked out. We’ll live. This is a good problem to have."
Brandon, can you talk about what it was like to do the dramatic work that you did in this film?
Brandon T Jackson: "This is going to sound so corny, but I used to watch a lot of Disney movies when I was a kid. Aladdin used to look over the skyline at what he could have. I didn’t want Benny to just be funny. I wanted him to represent the kid who really wants to do more, but he can’t because of his current situation of being in the projects. It’s not his fault, but it’s his birthright and what he was born with, so I tried to embody that."
"If you look at the film, when you see the projects, everybody is poor, but you look over and there’s a big skyline of richness and you’re like, 'Why can’t we just go past this block?' In that one scene, I tried to embody that for every kid that feels like they want to get out. That’s what I was trying to do. I talked to some of my cousins and listened to what they would say, and they were like, 'We just can’t control it. We can’t eat.' It makes no sense that we’re in America and some people just can’t eat. That’s bad. They have to depend on the government to eat. So, I just felt it, and then I tried to get mad at Bow Wow, but it’s hard to get mad at him because he’s got those hazel eyes and he’s nice. He’s a cool dude, so I had to try to find reasons to get mad at him in that scene. It was nuts. That was two hours, but it was a good time though."
