Common

3. Excuse me for one second

Peace. Hey. Yeah, if they can. Yeah. Definitely. OK. Word. What time is it now? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I’ll probably think about 3:45. OK. Yeah. I’m in an interview now. At 3:30 she can start setting up. Can we do it outside? Yeah. Well, let’s just do it outside in the city of Chicago somewhere. A parking garage. If she finds a place outside, I’ll do it. All right, love.

Common is polite—he always excuses himself before answering his cell. If the music industry hasn’t divested him of his humility yet, it’s unlikely Hollywood will either. Aside from his performance in Dave Chapelle’s Block Party, the lifelong movie fanatic (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and On the Waterfront are his favorites) is just beginning to explore the other side of the silver screen. He talks about working on the sets of Smokin’ Aces and American Gangster with earnest awe. For Common, acting, like music, is all about passion. He took classes before he started auditioning for roles, to make sure it was something he could be passionate about, which it emphatically was. He loves his acting classes, attending whenever his schedule permits, and he enjoys working with a cast. “I like being part of a team; I played sports,” he says. “When you’re making music, the producers are your team, but everything falls on your shoulders.”

Directed by Joe Carnahan, and starring Ryan Reynolds, Jeremy Piven, Ben Affleck, Andy Garcia, Jason Bateman, Alicia Keys and Ray Liotta, Smokin’ Aces is about ex-mobster-turned-Vegas-magician Buddy “Aces” Israel (Piven), who turns evidence on his former employers and finds himself caught in an intersecting network of plots variously predicated upon his doom and salvation. Common plays Israel’s right-hand man, Sir Ivy. “I love that he’s a dark character that’s sensitive,” Common says. “He’s one of the sharpest killers in the movie, but he’s very intelligent and warrior-like; he has a heart.”

Common will also inhabit the criminal mind in Ridley Scott’s American Gangster this fall. The film is about a narcotics officer (Russell Crowe) struggling to bring down Harlem heroin kingpin Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington). Common plays Lucas’ brother, Turner, a role he jumped on for the chance to work with Washington (from whom he learned not just about acting, but about “how to be a responsible man and a good leader”) and for the script’s greyscale treatment of good and evil. “It’s contrasting two people,” he muses. “One is bringing in heroin in caskets, but he’s going to church and taking care of his family; the other guy has problems, like womanizing, but he’s working hard to bring down the guys he feels are doing wrong.”

If all these gangster roles seem like a stretch for the anti-gangster rapper, Common sees no conflict of interest: “When I’m a character,” he explains, “I’m another person. I’ve been told that every character has to have some part of you in him, and you portray that character for whatever reasons you find purposeful. … I just try to bring those human elements to each character. They’re not going to be me, and that’s the fun part about it: I get to explore sides of myself that I don’t express.”

There it is again: purpose. Common’s longevity has a lot to do with his life-affirming morality and musical gifts, but it has just as much to do with his unremitting sense of personal purpose, of meaning in a meaningless age. It doesn’t matter so much whether that purpose is to find forever or to just be. Conviction is a rare commodity, and as long as it’s there, we feel it. Whether Common’s is refracted through music or film, it’s palpable and refreshing. And he knows it. “I always wanted to be important in hip-hop,” he says, “to leave a mark and to help people. It’s hard to see what you are in the world and the music business, the way you serve, but if you know your purpose and create art you feel is pure and sincere, you let the people decide who you are at that point. You don’t stop and look too much; you have your purpose and go for it.”