As he gets ready to embark on his Final Lap Tour, rap icon and Men’s Health cover star Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson takes a look back at some of the most significant chapters of his 20-year career in an episode of our new series The Rewind.
While going through some very early photos, 50 took MH through his early life, from his time building a tough persona at a juvenile facility—”if they look at you like you might be a hard time, they might not wanna have the altercation”—to the start of his rap career, when he would perform in a bulletproof vest.
“This is almost a hallmark,” he says. “The beginning of my career, I was seen more often with it than without it.” He doesn’t remember the exact moment he stopped wearing the vest, just that it was around the same time that his personal security leveled up, and he began to travel in armored vehicles: “the same stuff Obama was riding in.”
After the success of his first album and tour, 50 recalls he thought he was a “bad bitch” and he enjoyed the female attention that came with it. But after a while, that messed with his head, and he found himself avoiding afterparties. “The girl’s looking at you, and you’re like, ‘oh she thinks she’s gonna get me.'”
One woman who absolutely could get 50 Cent? Oscar-winning actress Dame Helen Mirren, whom he met at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival. “She’s sexy,” he says with unabashed certainty. “She’ll look at you, and you go ‘oh shit!’ I don’t care how old she get, I don’t give a fuck what nobody says, she’s sexy… It’s her confidence, it’s everything that she is for all of these years. She’s gonna be sexy forever.”
50 also shouts out the people who have proven to be hugely important sources of support in his life, explaining that Eminem in particular has always been a “safe place” he can turn to. “I guess he just wanted me to win the entire time,” he says. “You don’t even know you can make a relationship like that in the older adult stages of your life… he just came in and was that guy for me.”
With an ever-growing resume as an actor and producer, 50 has a laundry list of shows in the pipeline—including a TV adaptation of Eminem’s 8 Mile. His ultimate goal, however? “To make diversity seem the norm.”
“I want to be able to create projects that command attention by being multicultural projects, not just Black projects,” he says. “If you make a project [with an] all-white cast, you’re up against the greatest cinematography of all time, because it’s been done so well for so long… When you start to offer different cultures, different people’s journeys and stuff like that, we can tap into something that hasn’t been done. And it could be amazing. It could be a step forward.”
Philip Ellis is News Editor at Men’s Health, covering fitness, pop culture, sex and relationships, and LGBTQ+ issues. His work has appeared in GQ, Teen Vogue, Man Repeller and MTV, and he is the author of Love & Other Scams.
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