When you were growing up, did you watch Starsky & Hutch? You strike me as more of a Diff'rent Strokes fan. I watched all of them-Starsky & Hutch, The Jeffersons, What's Happening!!, Good Times. Anything that had black people on TV-I was watching it.
Did the original Huggy Bear, as he was played by Antonio Fargas, shape the person that you've become today? No, he wasn't a big influence on my life. I just remember I liked his character on the show. I felt like I could do that, too, but add a little more flavor to it. Do certain things he wasn't allowed to do back in the day, but I was able to do now.
And what's Huggy Bear like now? Well, he's like he was in the '70s-he's just got a little more style, a little more grace. A little more conversational. He's more of a ladies' man now. Know what I'm sayin'?
Were you able to incorporate your own clothing into his wardrobe? Oh, yeah. All his outfits had a little bit of my flavor. This had to be all the way official. I wasn't gonna do this halfway.
Is anyone allowed to call you Huggy Bear when you're not on the set? Some of my people still do! A few of the females.
Was it difficult to convince the filmmakers to give you the role? Convincing them that I could do it was more about me showing up on time and knowing my lines, not if I could handle the role. I didn't have a good name in Hollywood, because they hadn't dealt with me as an actor-they had dealt with me as a rapper. As a rapper, I show up late, I smoke weed, I do what the fuck I want to do, 'cause I'm the boss. In the movie world, you got to have a little more respect.
So did you behave better for the film? Hell, no! I was still being me. I wasn't gonna change for them. I was just letting them know I understand making movies is a different process.
Who's whiter-Ben Stiller or Owen Wilson? Man, I really enjoyed working with those fellas. But probably Ben Stiller.
When Hollywood makes the movie about your life, would you want your mom to be played by Kim Basinger? Naw, my mom's got a little more soul than that.
How about Halle Berry? She can play my wife.
In the year 2004, are you concerned that your Snoop-speak might be getting played out? Yeah, I think it went overboard after a while. It's weird to hear kids talking like that.
Do you have any words of advice for George Clinton? Yeah: Get Johnnie Cochran.
I understand you're a big fan of AOL 9.0. Can you tell me what advantages it might offer over, say, the latest version of MSN? They pay a lot of money to Snoop Dogg. That's probably the biggest advantage.
While they bantered and backslapped their way through four campy seasons of undercover assignments, was it possible that Dave Starsky and Ken Hutchinson were secretly the small screen's first same-sex couple? "I will not comment on whether or not Starsky and Hutch are gay," says the film's director, Todd Phillips. "I think there's been far too much made of it already. But I will say that I always saw this as a romantic comedy between two men-two straight men." It's a theme that the 33-year-old filmmaker has previously explored in the bawdy male-bonding farces Road Trip and Old School, which Phillips acknowledges are "really about men's relationships with each other." The plot of Starsky & Hutch, he says, "has the beats of a romantic comedy. The movie starts with them apart. They get put together, and they fight it at first, but then they're pried apart, and they come back together. Those are the same beats that you'd see in Notting Hill."
That sublimated sexual tension isn't exactly defused by the presence of Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson (Meet the Parents, Zoolander, The Royal Tenenbaums), cast once again as a mismatched duo who find themselves inexorably drawn to each other. "They make such a good comic pairing," says Phillips, "because they're so different. That's the same reason Starsky and Hutch make such good cops together. They sort of fill each other's void." Even when he isn't trying, Phillips shrugs, "I'm selling the movie as a gay love story." D.I.
