Why is recent alleged wife-abuser and former teen heartthrob Johnny Depp Starring in a Tupac/Biggie Movie? Oh, he’s playing a cop in the forthcoming Labyrinth:
Depp will play Detective Russell Poole, a former Los Angeles police detective who theorized that Death Row Records mogul Suge Knight staged the shooting of Tupac to get out of paying him millions of dollars in royalties. Poole also believed that Knight worked with an LAPD officer to kill Biggie in retaliation for Tupac’s murder. He ultimately left the force and dedicated his life to the case, before passing away from a heart attack in 2015.
That makes sense, I guess, but I’m not the first commentator to think about this SNL sketch after reading all the headlines:
The Guardian has a piece by another writer who has investigated the Tupac/Biggie murders and writes that Labyrinth comes to the wrong conclusions, anyway:
Poole died of a heart attack last year and left a legacy of a committed detective who wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power. Unfortunately for him and Johnny Depp, however, his theories don’t hold up to scrutiny. During reporting for my new book I studied all of the theories in the Tupac and Notorious BIG murders, and didn’t find Poole’s compelling. Instead, I’m more inclined to believe conclusions reached by another former LAPD detective, named Greg Kading, who began his investigations in 2006, and published his findings in his 2011 book Murder Rap and a 2015 documentary of the same name.
Kading believed it was gang members, not corrupt cops, who killed the dueling rappers. Never fear; there are several other Tupac and Biggie films in the works.