Mike Epps Cast as Richard Pryor in New Lee Daniels Biopic
It’s official, it’s been a long time coming, and it has Oprah’s blessing.
Director Lee Daniels has confirmed that actor and standup comedian Mike Epps has been cast as Richard Pryor in his upcoming biopic of the late comic legend. The Oscar-nominated director posted the news yesterday via a Twitter photo in which he poses with Epps and Oprah Winfrey, whom Daniels directed in last year’s White House-set biopic The Butler.
Epps confirmed the news himself with a tweet that included a photo (below) of him kissing the ring of Pryor’s widow, Jennifer Lee.
According to earlier reports, other actors who reportedly auditioned for the role included Michael B. Jordan, Marlon Wayans, and Nick Cannon. Anne Hathaway and Kate Bosworth are reportedly being considered to play Jennifer Lee Pryor.
Epps, a native of Indianapolis, has made no secret of his reverence for the groundbreaking comic. “I love him to death,” Epps has said. “The master. He’s a wizard. He’s a wizard of comedy. So everybody’s got to bow down to him.
This will not be the first time Epps has portrayed "the wizard" — he played Pryor in the still-unreleased 2013 biopic Nina. And neither is it the first time Epps, 43, has been attached to play the stand-up icon in a feature-length biopic. Nine years ago, the Next Friday star had been the choice of Pryor and his wife in a version of the story that they would have produced. Pryor, who had multiple sclerosis, died of a heart attack in December 10, 2005.
Other potential projects based on Pryor’s dramatic life and incident-filled life — Pryor famously set himself on fire while smoking cocaine and drinking in 1980 — were to have included Marlon Wayans and his brother, Damon.
While almost all of Epps’s film and TV credits have been in comedy, the former star of Def Comedy Jam showed a more dramatic side playing an violent drug dealer in the 2012 remake of Sparkle, starring Jordin Sparks and Whitney Houston.
Expect Epps’s version of Pryor to go well beyond the lurid headlines. “This man’s got some beautiful stories about himself,” the actor has said. “He donated money to Martin Luther King when nobody else donated him money for a project he was doing. He helped kids. We want to show the beauty of him because it’s never been shown.”
