Cynthia Erivo, the Oscar-nominated star of Wicked, has been cast as Afeni Shakur, the Black Panther activist and mother of Tupac Shakur, in Snoop, Universal Pictures’ biopic of Snoop Dogg. The studio confirmed the casting on Wednesday, November 4, and the film is dated for theaters on August 6, 2027.
It is the most high-profile name yet in a cast that has been filling up since late summer, and it brings one of hip hop’s most famous mothers into a story built around Snoop’s rise at Death Row Records. We first flagged the film’s 2027 date when Snoop turned 55 in October.
Who plays who
Jonathan Daviss, known for Outer Banks, leads the film as Snoop. Around him, the studio has now placed most of the Death Row orbit:
- Camron Jones as Tupac Shakur
- Cynthia Erivo as Afeni Shakur
- Lauren London as Beverly Tate, Snoop’s mother
- Myles Bullock as Dr. Dre
- Tre Hale as Suge Knight
- Algee Smith as Warren G
- Olly Sholotan as Kurupt and Corey Champagne as Nate Dogg
Craig Brewer, the Hustle & Flow director, is behind the camera, working from his own rewrite of an original script by Joe Robert Cole. Snoop produces with Death Row Pictures president Sara Ramaker and Imagine Entertainment’s Brian Grazer and Allan Mandelbaum. It is the first project under the Death Row Pictures deal with NBCUniversal, and it will draw on music from Snoop’s catalog. Cameras are already rolling in Southern California.
Who Afeni Shakur was
Born Alice Faye Williams in Lumberton, North Carolina, in 1947, she moved to the South Bronx at 11 and joined the Black Panther Party when it opened a Harlem office in 1968. A year later she was one of 21 Panthers arrested in New York on conspiracy charges, the case remembered as the Panther 21. She acted as her own lawyer, cross-examining witnesses in court, and the group was acquitted in May 1971.
Tupac was born a month later, on June 16, 1971. Afeni was 24. Their relationship was often strained, and he turned it into “Dear Mama,” his 1995 tribute to her. After his death in 1996 she ran his estate, set up the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation and founded Amaru Entertainment, until she died in 2016.
Put those dates against the film’s timeline and the role comes into focus. The two rappers first crossed paths in 1993, at a Los Angeles party marking the end of filming on Poetic Justice, which makes Afeni about 46 in the years the movie is most likely to cover, when Snoop helped bring her son to Death Row in 1995 and the two cut “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted” for All Eyez on Me. How much screen time she gets has not been disclosed.
Erivo’s track record with real lives
Erivo is a Tony, Grammy and Emmy winner with three Academy Award nominations, the latest for playing Elphaba in Universal’s two-part Wicked. Playing a real person is familiar ground: she earned her first Oscar nomination as Harriet Tubman in Harriet in 2019 and played Aretha Franklin in the anthology series Genius.
The Harriet role came with a debate over a London-born actor of Nigerian heritage playing a Black American icon, and some fans have raised it again this week. Erivo has said in past interviews that “valid points had been made” while arguing the discussion should go further.
For Snoop, the stakes are personal. When he inducted Tupac into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, he said he wanted his friend remembered as “a strong black man who stood up.” The film that puts that friendship, and the woman who raised Tupac, on screen arrives on August 6, 2027, about nine months from now.
Further reading
Image: Thesavagenorwegian, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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