 |
Which is maybe why Rhames felt right at home at the High Desert State Prison in Nevada, where much of the gritty boxing drama Undisputed was shot on location, employing actual inmates as extras. Undisputed opens in theatres Friday.
"I grew up around criminals," said Rhames, who plays George "Iceman" Chambers, the reigning world heavyweight champ who is jailed for a rape he says he didn't commit. "Those guys, I think we gave a lot to them by just being a new stimuli in their life, and something they had to look forward to. They dug me. Iceman was their kind of guy, basically."
Rhames co-stars with Wesley Snipes, who plays convicted murderer Monroe Hutchen, the best boxer in the fictitious Sweetwater Prison. When Iceman joins the jailhouse population, the two men set off on a collision course of brawn and ego that ends with a secret bout to determine who the true champion is.
Rhames's character is a cocksure and thuggish fighter, and the film's similarities to Mike Tyson's career and crimes aren't lost on Rhames.
"I know Mike Tyson, and I said, 'OK, there are some parallels here,' " he said. "I don't even know if he knows what this film is about. He knows it has boxing in it, but I don't think he knows what the storyline is."
Rhames's memories of growing up in Harlem have given him a soft spot for society's dispossessed, including convicts. One inmate he met while shooting Undisputed had been in the Broadway musical Black and Blue and was serving time in Nevada for cocaine possession.
"I bought him a pair of shoes before I left, a nice two-tone, $300 pair of tap shoes because he was a hoofer," said Rhames. "In a sense (inmates) are forgotten, and they're not a part of our lives. And so it just brought me back to growing up in Harlem, when I wasn't a part of mainstream America. They didn't think about me.
"When I was growing up I remember people shooting up heroin, but it didn't become an 'epidemic' until it reached out to middle America."
Rhames escaped the cycle of poverty, drugs and death that claimed many of his childhood acquaintances, to become an actor, starring in a long list of films that includes Pulp Fiction, Out of Sight, Bringing Out the Dead and both Mission: Impossible movies.
He's been tapped to return as Luther Stickell in Mission: Impossible 3, directed by Fight Club's David Fincher. ("That should be interesting." laughed Rhames.) He just hopes that the filming of the third instalment in Tom Cruise's spy franchise doesn't get hit with the type of production delays that plagued M:I-2.
"On the last one I made $900,000 before we ever started filming, because they just kept postponing," said Rhames. "It got a little ridiculous after a while."
Rhames won a Golden Globe award for playing legendary boxing promoter Don King in HBO's Don King: Only In America - an award which he tearfully gave to his idol and fellow nominee Jack Lemmon during the presentation ceremony - and is gearing up to act in yet another boxing flick, this time playing the late heavyweight champ Sonny Liston in a biopic directed by the Hughes brothers.
"I didn't choose acting, acting chose me," said Rhames of the path that brought him from the Harlem ghetto to the silver screen. "I think that's what God really blessed me with and I'm doing what I was put on this planet to do."