Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson didn’t become an entertainment mogul by being diplomatic. Whether when he was emerging as a hip-hop legend during the aughts, or developing his hit Starz crime drama Power into a franchise that now spans four series, he always gets things done with a mix of talent, shrewdness, aggression, and forthrightness. And he expects everyone who’s a part of his empire to share the same drive. For example, he remembers the network’s skepticism about casting Omari Hardwick in Power’s lead role of nightclub owner and drug dealer James “Ghost” St. Patrick, 50 Cent recalls having to spell out to Hardwick what was at stake for the actor. “I ended up having a conversation with Omari for two hours,” he recounts, relaxing in an empty event space at the private NoHo social club Zero Bond. “The first thing he said to me was, ‘Alright, then they can give it to somebody else. I’m like, ‘Nigga, you got a plan B?!’”
Hardwick rose to the occasion, 50 Cent had his lead, and Power, which premiered in 2014 and followed St. Patrick as he struggled to straddle the line between entrepreneur and criminal, became Starz’s most-viewed program by the end of its six-season run, averaging roughly 10 million multi-platform viewers per episode. This led to the creation of three spin-offs comprising the “Power Universe.” Power Book ll: Ghost, which picked up where the original series left off, debuted in 2020. The next year saw the debut of Power Book lll: Raising Kanan, a prequel set during the early ‘90s; it returned for its second season on August 14 and was recently renewed for a third. Power Book IV: Force premiered earlier this year and expands the universe from New York to Chicago. 50 Cent, 47, also unveiled BMF last fall, a drama inspired by the origin of the Black Mafia Family’s infamous drug-smuggling and money-laundering operation in 1980s Detroit. Although each show fits into the crime drama category, 50 Cent has a slightly different slant on them. “I look at my shows like family dramas,” he says, clad in a plaid navy-blue wool suit that hugs his broad shoulders, a navy blue turtleneck, and white Stan Smith sneakers on this cold February day. “They just have the intensity of the street life in them.”
Viewers know exactly what they’re getting from the shows 50 Cent produces. There is always drama that knowingly borders on soapy ridiculousness, along with an abundance of sex and violence. And the casts feature music greats like Mary J. Blige and Method Man in pivotal roles, and the occasional high-profile cameo, such as: Eminem (with some digital de-aging), as a young version of drug dealer Richard “White Boy Rick” Wershe in BMF; Kendrick Lamar, showing up as a drug addict in Power; and 50 Cent, of course, who portrayed the villainous Kanan Stark in the majority of OG Power and performs each show’s theme song. The audience is heavily invested in the formula. While the viewership for AMC’s similarly sprawling Walking Dead universe has waned, earlier this year 50 Cent shared (and eventually deleted) Starz internal information showing that Ghost, Raising Kanan, and BMF were the three top-rated scripted cable series’ in African-American households. Shortly after, Force drew the biggest premiere in Starz’s history to date, with 3.3 million cross-platform views in the U.S.
As with his music career, where he elevated his visibility through personal conflict, 50 Cent has a propensity for starting digital fires to call attention to his TV shows. His music fused brilliant, melodic hooks with a rugged edge, but he was always selling himself. That’s still the case, but now he’s a behind-the-scenes force who’s happy to step out into the open and start a war, even if he has to make one up: He’s arguably even more calculatingly contentious as a TV producer than he was as a musician. And with 25 shows sold across nine networks, and more in production, it seems to be working. 50 Cent became a mogul by creating his own genre, and he’s determined to do what he needs to keep growing his empire. “They came for 50 Cent, but they stayed for us,” says Joseph Sikora, who played St. Patrick’s volatile co-conspirator Tommy Egan in Power, and is now the main character in Force. “He didn’t want to see a picture of 50 Cent in the mirror. He wanted to see a picture of Benjamin Franklin.”
50 Cent’s smirk, which he flashes frequently and intentionally, is an indicator of his confidence: There are few things he doesn’t believe he can get away with or accomplish. Large-scale success has been the norm for him for the past two decades. His debut album, 2003’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’, sold over 800,000 copies in each of its first two weeks of release, en route to moving nine million units in the United States to date. His second album, 2005’s The Massacre, sold over a million copies in its first week and is certified six times platinum. Get Rich or Die Tryin’ positioned 50 Cent to star in a 2005 semi-autobiographical film of the same name, directed by Jim Sheridan, who guided Daniel Day-Lewis to his first Academy Award for his performance in 1989’s My Left Foot. In 2007, the rapper’s investment in Vitamin Water reportedly earned him as much as $100 million after the company was purchased by Coca-Cola. That’s when he really started to branch out.
In 2009, he and producer Randall Emmett, who later became an executive producer of Power, founded the film production company Cheetah Vision. (Their relationship has since soured, with 50 Cent terrorizing Emmett via Instagram over an unpaid $1 million debt in 2019. “See this is why I made him give me my Money by Monday,” 50 Cent wrote in a now-deleted Instagram post regarding a recent Los Angeles Times exposé about Emmett’s alleged fraud, abuse, and sexual misconduct, “Then after he had to stay a 100 feet away from me.”) Two years later, the company signed a $200 million deal for ten low-budget action films to be distributed by Lionsgate and Grindstone Entertainment Group. (The deal has resulted in many “geezer teasers,” in which aging stars like Bruce Willis, Robert De Niro, and Ray Liotta got big paydays for minimal work, as their names on a poster boosted international grosses.)
During the early 2010s, 50 Cent’s interests shifted from film to television as he noticed the lines between the two blurring, as “movie stars” began appearing in TV series more frequently. Though his first foray into television was a 2013 Sundance Channel reality show, Dream School, he was already trying to find a home for Power. Intrigued by the possibility of landing a drama that appealed to his tastes on a premium network (he’s a big Forensic Files and Mindhunter fan), 50 Cent began pitching the show in 2012 along with creator and showrunner Courtney Kemp. Every network passed except for Starz, which officially greenlit Power in 2013. During the pitch meeting with former Starz CEO Chris Albrecht (who helped build HBO’s Sunday night lineups during the late 1990s and early 2000s with network and era-defining prestige vehicles such as Sex and the City, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and The Wire), 50 Cent and Kemp stressed the importance of music in relation to mood. To support the pitch, 50 Cent recorded eight new songs.
“What we would do that was different was we would play a minute and 30 seconds of the song, and then she would go into a certain portion of the pitch,” he remembers. “And then we’d play a minute and 30 seconds of another song, and then speak about the importance of the music being in the right places. And [Albrecht’s] looking at it going, ‘Okay, so I get the whole musical thing, and then there’s an audience that’s already connected to 50 Cent that we can actually cultivate—or bring that audience.’”
According to Kemp, she and 50 Cent were adamant that Power be music driven. “That show is a roller coaster of emotion, and music serves to underscore those points,” she says. “I won’t say we broke ground, but it’s something that is a feature of those series’, of course.”
Each show’s soundtrack leans on hip-hop and R&B needle drops, while the period series Raising Kanan and BMF rely on the power of nostalgia to ground them in the past and underscore big scenes. In Raising Kanan, a murder is accompanied by the teenage LaVerne “Jukebox” Ganner (Hailey Kilgore) singing Whitney Houston’s “You Give Good Love” a cappella. And on BMF, the unhinged drug dealer Lamar Silas (Eric Kofi-Abrefa) sings Loose Ends’ “You Can’t Stop the Rain” before fatally stabbing an associate.
Their approach worked. Power caught on almost immediately, and only grew from there: Its first-season finale went on to draw twice the audience of its premiere and established the show as a new hit within a growing TV landscape.
As the biggest name attached to Power, 50 Cent’s responsibility, aside from serving as an executive producer and frequent co-star, was using his cachet to market the show. So he turned to one of his favorite strategies: Starting shit. Power’s rise coincided with that of Empire, Fox’s campy drama, comedy, and ratings juggernaut that starred Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard. Empire began in early 2015, seven months after Power’s premiere, and although the shows had little in common other than predominantly Black casts, 50 Cent used Empire’s ascent to promote Power.
“When Power hits the bullseye, then Empire comes,” he says, thinking back on his scheme with clear satisfaction. “And because the executives over there are smart, they use Power. They say [in their marketing]: ‘Empires are built on power.’ I go, ‘Oh shit, see how they stole my shit?’” But wait: He didn’t actually believe that. “I was really creating that problem publicly because [Fox] had more money than Starz. They’re going to spend way more marketing dollars on Empire than I can spend on what I have going on with Power. So, I would say things to make you feel like there’s beef between me and them. The coverage that you get from it being beef would make them always have me in thought. The journalist comes to talk to them, the first thing they say is: ‘Yeah, the show is great. I got a chance to see the first two episodes, but 50 said you ain’t shit. So how you feel about that?’”
This has been the 50 playbook for decades. “If you don’t have enemies, you should make them,” he says. “You can compete with someone without notifying them. Being competitive will give you energy to do some shit that you [didn’t think you could]. I do this to a lot of the culture.” His strategically divisive tactics can routinely cross over into abject bullying. This is par for the course for someone who has publicly humiliated protégés and first broke through in hip-hop by imagining himself robbing various music industry figures. And trolling isn’t just business, it’s also a hobby: He’s prone to attacking people with no corporate motivation at all. He’s so committed to the practice that he even cruelly mocked the hair of one of his own shows’ stars. He’s been widely criticized for it and, in some instances, forced to apologize due to mounting backlash. But even though his hand gets slapped more often these days, he’s still unlikely to adjust his modus operandi because, aside from the lack of material consequences, he’s convinced himself that animus is good.
Kemp insists there’s a line between Curtis Jackson, the entrepreneur and artist, and 50 Cent, the scornful provocateur. “The beefs and all of that belong to that person,” she says of the latter. “But Curtis is the person who sits on set, looks at the monitor, and says, ‘Yeah, that shit works.’” The reality is that they’re one and the same, both in pursuit of the same goal: indisputable success.
Always one for self-aggrandizement, 50 Cent believes the Power Universe has done a better job of creating memorable characters and making lesser-known actors noteworthy than Empire or Snowfall, FX’s fictional account of crack’s origin in 1980s Los Angeles. “You got guys that’ve been on those shows for years now and you don’t know them,” he says. “When you’re in the Power Universe, you know the actor. Because I’m going to make you know who these people are.” That’s not entirely true. For example, Snowfall’s star, Damson Idris, has blossomed as the show has emerged as FX’s most-watched series. To that end, 50 Cent indicates an eagerness to work with Idris in the future—perhaps as some ultimate display of one-upmanship. “Watch, I’m going to get him,” he says, leaning forward and flaunting that sly grin. “I like him. He’s dope.”
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It’s hard to imagine 50 Cent having an iota of self-doubt, but he admits to being nervous when he launched the Power spin-offs. He was particularly worried about the first one, Ghost, because he wasn’t sure audiences would be as interested in St. Patrick’s son, Tariq (Michael Rainey Jr.), trying to balance college and the underworld that he got entangled in after killing his father at the conclusion of Power. “I was worried about the stakes being lower because he hadn’t done anything but knocked his father off,” says 50 Cent. (It also didn’t help that Power fans came to despise Tariq.) Still, he believes that part of the reason Ghost performed so well is because it resonates with a younger demographic that sees it itself in the show, even at its most outrageous.
He keeps his worries private, though. As a producer, he works to calm his cast’s unease by projecting pure confidence. Before Mary J. Blige joined Ghost, she was nervous about signing on to play the ruthless crime lord Monet Tejada. Despite being nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe in 2018 for her performance in Dee Rees’s Mudbound, acting was still relatively new to her. But 50 Cent soothed her anxiety by insisting that her following, amassed over the past 30 years, would follow her everywhere. “He told me, ‘Your fan base is going to go crazy over Monet, because they’re all the same age as you, and grew up with you, and they want to continue to grow with you,’” Blige remembers. “He was 100 percent right.”
La La Anthony, who played Lakeisha Grant in Power and currently portrays Markaisha Taylor in BMF, also attests to 50 Cent’s commitment to his word in an industry where false promises are common practice. “We live in this world where everyone’s like, ‘I got you, we’re gonna do this next time,’ but when he says we’re doing it, we really do it,” Anthony says. “As long as you come through on your end of the deal, it’s gonna get done.”
50 Cent being direct, even to withering extents, is also a function of being an involved producer with his actors. “People always say, ‘It’s a vanity credit’ and I say, ‘No, he’s producing in a very muscular way,’ whether it’s encouraging them or being someone they can talk to,” Kemp says. “And a lot of them weren’t famous, then Power blew them up, then all of a sudden they couldn’t walk through the airport. 50 was able to help them with that, and that is producing.”
As someone who takes great pride in results, 50 Cent demands that his projects meet a certain standard. During the process of casting BMF, he became convinced that the person to play the younger version of Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory—the leader of the Black Mafia Family, who was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison in 2008—should be his son, Demetrius “Lil Meech” Flenory Jr., even though he had no acting experience. In addition to moving him from Miami to Los Angeles, for a year and a half 50 Cent paid for him to attend acting classes twice a day, five times a week, while making sure he also understood the gravity of the situation. “I still had to show them that I could carry a show myself, because it’s a lot of money and time being invested, so he just wanted to make sure I was 100 percent ready,” Lil Meech says.
Though he’s happy to brag about his ratings and the subsequent success of the actors whose careers he’s boosted, he remains rankled that his shows are ignored by the Emmys. He criticized the awards last year after no actors of color were awarded, despite a record number of nominations, and he previously called out the Emmys specifically for Power’s lack of nominations. After this year’s nominees were announced, 50 Cent wisecracked that, at long last, he was finally going to win an Emmy for participating in Super Bowl LVI’s halftime show. So far, the lone award that he’s won is a 2020 NAACP Image Award for directing an episode of Power. “When you’re not actually being placed in categories to be the loser, they just don’t want to acknowledge you,” 50 Cent says. “It’s not personal to me because it’s diversity itself that is fighting its way through. Before this, if you had the white lead on a white show, you had a better shot at being covered. This is just the way it is. And the last part of entertainment that is resistant to things being diverse is Hollywood.”
His complaints aren’t disingenuous—Hollywood is still as homogeneous as it is unimaginative. But he’s a marketer to the core, so one can’t help but wonder how much of this should be interpreted as an aggressive method of wedging his shows into conversations that he wants them to be part of. And yet there is something different in the way he speaks about being overlooked: Whereas he inches forward with enthusiasm when detailing what excites him, or reclines in contentment when reveling in some personal victory, he grows solemn when discussing perceived slights. That’s why he finds such gratification in succeeding despite being disregarded by the Television Academy. For 50 Cent, making an impact regardless of Emmy notice is the ultimate “Fuck you” from someone who loves saying it, one way or another.
50 Cent is jovial when we reconnect by phone in May. “I want this to be a hit,” he jokingly says in reference to this profile. He was considerably less playful in the months following Force’s February premiere, sounding off about Starz on Twitter and Instagram. The relationship had been particularly fraught; in March he threatened to leave the network due to Force not yet being renewed for a second season, and claimed he was trying to purchase the Power spin-offs from the network. After Starz put A Moment in Time: Murder Was the Case, a scripted series based on Snoop Dogg’s 1993 murder charge and subsequent trial, in turnaround, 50 Cent announced he would take another upcoming series, The Massacre, elsewhere.
As it currently stands, the Power franchise and BMF will all proceed on Starz, but the overall deal 50 Cent’s G-Unit Film & Television company signed with the network in 2018 expires in September. If a new deal isn’t negotiated, he’ll no longer have to take anything to the network first before shopping it elsewhere. “They are not seeing or wholly registering the benefits of everything that’s going on because they’ve become accustomed to it,” he said in May, offering a measured perspective on their working relationship.
Currently, he has several additional projects in motion (some with Starz; some elsewhere; some still being sold), including some that are beyond the scope of what he’s best known for. One is Queen Nzinga, a historical drama for Starz that follows the Angolan ruler’s evolution into a warrior during the 17th century. “I’m going to make it like 300 where each frame is visually stimulating to the point that you forget you’re watching a period piece,” he says of the drama series.
In addition, 50 Cent and Anthony are producing a limited series about Cyntoia Brown-Long, a sex trafficking victim who was released from prison in 2019 after serving 15 years of the life sentence she received for killing a man at age 16. Anthony says that after reaching out to Brown-Long and her husband, she was happy to learn that they trusted her and 50 Cent with her story. “She and her husband called me back and said, ‘We thought about it and the only person we want to tell this story is 50,’” Anthony says. “But that’s the comfort level that people have with him, where they know he’s going to tell their stories the right way.”
The potential end of his deal with Starz isn’t slowing anything down. After working in network television as an executive producer of the ABC legal drama For Life, 50 Cent and Blige signed on as producers for the network’s Family Affair, a comedy about an over-the-hill R&B star suddenly forced to raise his sister’s children. “It’s a Black musical family—a bunch of young brothers and sisters that can sing very well—and it’s comedy, it’s drama, and all these things at one time,” Blige says.
No matter what happens in the ever-unpredictable world of TV and streaming, it seems certain that 50 Cent will have shows across multiple platforms. And when someone invents the next media platform, he’ll likely find a way onto that, as well. His pace as a producer—and an adversary—is unrelenting. When asked what his endgame is, he implies that he can keep going at this rate deep into the future.
“Do you know Morgan Freeman?” he asks. “You see how his whole head is gray? My whole fucking head can be gray and I can be doing what I’m doing right now.”