The Notorious M.O.V.I.E.

The black Lincoln Town Car dispatched by the media conglomerate edges into rush-hour traffic with a hired driver, a publicist, a writer and a dude who looks a lot like Biggie Smalls. The temperature drops with the light and, in the dim back set, Jamal Woolard—with his sleepy eyes, familiar pout and manchild physique—looks pretty damn notorious.

Creeping through Chinatown and over the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn, Woolard passes directions up front. He’s taking us to Bedford-Stuyvesant, the neighborhood where both he and Biggie grew up. Woolard, 27, is about to make his big-screen debut in Fox Searchlight’s Notorious, a biopic about the titanic rapper born Christopher Wallace, whose unsolved 1997 drive-by-shooting death still haunts hip-hop.

“Closest I ever got to Big,” Woolard says, “was the funeral, sad to say.”

Like Wallace, Woolard hustled drugs while putting together a rap career. In 2006, before an appearance on Manhattan’s star-making Hot 97, Woolard was shot in his Biggie-sized backside—perhaps, camera footage suggests, by a member of his own entourage. Without telling the DJs, Woolard did his spot sitting on a bullet.

Soon, MTV.com quoted Woolard as being in talks with the Wallace family, calling him “a virtual lock” for the role, though Fox and Woolard insist he was found via Fox’s virally marketed biggiecasting.com open call. In any case, give or take fictionalizations like 8 Mile, the film is hip-hop’s first biopic. And it could blow the hell up.

“If you’re a Biggie fan and you from Brooklyn, you supposed to know all the words, so I didn’t need much help with that,” Woolard says. Still, he put himself through Biggie boot camp, gaining 80 pounds, and having extensive conversations with Wallace’s mother, Voletta, to whom Woolard refers with maximum respect, always, as “Mrs. Wallace.” In the film, she’s portrayed with equal gravitas by Angela Bassett.

Stepping onto the corner of Fulton Street and St. James Place, a half-block from Biggie’s crib, Woolard seems to relax and start being himself. “It’s just a regular day in the ’hood,” he says. “It doesn’t feel weird. I never left.” Woolard still lives in Brooklyn, though he’s no longer in Bed-Stuy.

It’s getting cold. Woolard turns to a man standing on a stoop. “Who block is this, big homey?” he asks.

“Biggie’s block,” the man says quietly.

“It’s a little mind-boggling,” I say, “the idea of this huge corporation representing this street, putting it in movie theaters.”

“It’s an amazing thing,” replies Woolard, a post-bling entrepreneur who refers to his debut album, God Willing, as “dropping in the second quarter.” For him, it’s all just a different hustle.

“There goes Nino, from Junior M.A.F.I.A.,” Woolard says, pointing back at the corner. “One of Big’s right hand mans.”

More than a decade after his death, Biggie’s presence still looms large. “He the Shakespeare of the ghetto,” Woolard says. “Ask anybody. That’s how we feel.”