‘Unsolved’s Wavyy Jonez & Marcc Rose On Tonight’s Finale & Playing Tupac & B.I.G. – Next Generation TV
May 1, 2018‘Unsolved’s Wavyy Jonez & Marcc Rose On Tonight’s Finale & Playing Tupac & B.I.G. – Next Generation TV
SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details of tonight’s Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. finale on USA Network.
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“There was a lot of information that was spilled in Unsolved that hasn’t been touched on,” Wavyy Jonez says of Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. in our latest installment of Next Generation TV. “You’ll get closure,” adds Marcc Rose of tonight’s finale of the USA Network series, on which he plays Tupac Shakur to Jonez’ Biggie. “And you have a few final testimonies,” he adds of the limited series that co-stars Jimmi Simpson, Bokeem Woodbine and Josh Duhamel.
As you can see in the video above, Straight Outta Compton alum Rose and Jonez are pretty much as tight as the two rappers were in real life before things went fatally wrong in the mid-1990s. Besides teasing the conclusion of the 10-parter created and written by Kyle Long and mainly directed by Anthony Hemingway, Rose and Jonez also revealed to me their own friendship and how it informed them portraying the iconic duo.
“He’s more than just the quote unquote gangsta rapper that everybody speaks of,” newcomer Jonez told me about what Unsolved unearthed for him about Christopher Wallace, aka the Notorious B.I.G. “He was a person, you know, he was human. And that’s what Anthony and Kyle wanted to do, they wanted to represent these two in a light that showed humanity.”
As almost everyone knows, out of the infamous East Coast and West Coast beef, Tupac was shot dead in Las Vegas in 1996 and Biggie was gunned down in Los Angeles the next year. Despite dozens and potentially hundreds of witnesses and allegations of police involvement and cover-ups, neither case has ever been officially closed.
Moving back and forth from the years immediately before and after the killings and when the cases were reopened via a 2006 task force investigation, Unsolved is one of the best shows of the year so far in my opinion.
Behind the scenes on the series, based in part on Detective Greg Kading’s explosive and name-naming 2011 book Murder Rap, Kading was a co-executive producer on Unsolved, grounding it even more. In front of the camera, the cast of the series that premiered February 27 includes The Wire alum Wendell Pierce, Underground and 9-1-1 vet Aisha Hinds as Wallace’s justice-seeking mother, and How to Get Away with Murder‘s Amirah Vann.
So, before tonight’s finale, check out our conversation above. Then, if you haven’t already, take a look at last week’s Next Gen TV with The Oath cast members Katrina Law and Cory Hardrict, as well as my interview with SMILF‘s creator and star Frankie Shaw from April 20.