Wesley Snipes sat down on Conan O’Brien’s couch in August 2017, and Conan had a “Bad” story he wanted to check.
The rumor went like this. Before Snipes got the part opposite Michael Jackson in the “Bad” short film, Prince, the “Purple Rain” star, had been considered for it. Snipes didn’t deny it. He made it bigger.
“Me and Prince were auditioning together and I blew Prince out of the water,” he said. Michael, he went on, “met me and then kick[ed] Prince to the curb.” It was a joke, and he told it like one.
The part itself was real, though. “Bad” ran about 18 minutes, with Martin Scorsese directing from a script by the novelist Richard Price. Michael played Darryl, a kid back home from a fancy private school. Snipes played Mini Max, the leader of the neighborhood crew who isn’t sure Darryl still belongs there. Their face-off in the subway is the scene most fans remember.
This was years before “White Men Can’t Jump” and “Blade,” and Snipes wasn’t a famous face yet. He made the most of the role. Open Culture later wrote that his performance was so strong that “audiences and casting directors took notice.”
Michael, it turns out, had a very different idea of who Snipes was.
Conan put it to him directly. “When he met you, ’cause you’re playing a gang member, he thought that you were in a gang, is that right?”
“Unfortunately he did, sir,” Snipes said. “He really thought I was in the gang. He didn’t know that I was a trained thespian.”
So the biggest star in the world had walked onto his own set and taken his co-star for the real thing. Snipes had played Mini Max a little too well.
Wesley Snipes tells Conan what Michael thought about him on the “Bad” set
This is Team Coco’s official upload from “Conan” on TBS, just under three minutes long. Conan asks his question at about 0:55, and Snipes answers right after it. Stay with it to about 2:07 to hear who walked up to Snipes in Santa Monica years later.
Snipes didn’t stop at the confession. He kept the bit going, picturing a gang made up of trained actors, all of them “doing their breathing exercises.”
Then he offered his own theory on how the mix-up happened, and he said it with real warmth for the man he called “the great Michael.”
“I think at the time the great Michael, he hadn’t spent very much time in the hood,” Snipes said. “I guess he thought everybody was from the hood.”
Michael had been performing since he was a little boy, so it’s easy to see how a sharp young actor in a cap could fool him.
The last part of the story happened much later, and far from any subway. Snipes said he was out in Santa Monica when “a young man comes up to me and he asks… can we take a picture.”
“It turns out it was Prince Michael Jackson,” Snipes said. It was Michael’s son.
The young man whose dad once took Snipes for a real gang member wanted a picture with him. They took a selfie together, right there in Santa Monica.