Fifty, Fiddy. Boo Boo. All these have been, at some point, nicknames for Curtis Jackson.
Fortunately, Boo Boo never quite took off, the hip-hop star told Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday night (Aug. 11) when he stopped by NBC‘s The Tonight Show.
Jackson, or Fifty as he’s happy to be called, revealed his unfortunate old nickname while going a few rounds on his new TV series, and philanthropic ventures. The Queens rapper has just returned from the United Kingdom, where Starz‘s new drama Fightland was filmed.
A drama that enters the ring of professional boxing and London’s criminal underbelly, Fightland is Jackson’s first U.K.-based production through G-Unit Film & Television.
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“I was able to get some guys to work on it. I was using my juice card, know what I mean, calling up people,” he tells Fallon. The series has been in development since 2022, premiered July 31, and stars Howard Charles as a former heavyweight champion who, after a lengthy stint behind bars, returns to prize fighting with revenge on his mind.
Damione Macedon and Raphael Jackson Jr. (Power, Genius: MLK/X) are showrunners, writers and executive producers, while Daniel Fajemisin-Duncan and Marlon Smith serve as writers and EPs.
Jackson and Starz have a longstanding relationship; he’s an executive producer of the Power franchise, BMF and the unscripted The BMF Documentary: Blowing Money Fast. But there’s one genre he hasn’t cracked. Comedy. “I want to do a scripted comedy show,” he tells Fallon. Naturally, the talkshow host put his hand up.
The New York hip-hop heavyweight, who scored four No. 1s on the Billboard Hot 100 in the 2000s, including a nine-week reign with 2003’s “In Da Club,” is also the proud owner of green thumbs.
Jackson recounted the opening of the Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson Community Garden in the South Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, a green space inspired by Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project and his G-Unity Foundation. “When I realized what they did,” he said of the project to transform a neglected lot into an outdoor learning space, “I wanted to do that in my neighborhood.”
Watch the interview below.
