British actor Tim Roth was on “The Late Late Show with James Corden” last night to promote The Hateful Eight, and the host brought up a fantastic anecdote about Tim Roth joining Tupac Shakur on a trip to Death Row Records in the 1990s.
The genesis of the story starts with a long-forgotten film starring the two called Gridlock’d. Both played junkies trying to get clean in the crime dramedy, and in the process of filming Shakur brought his co-worker along with him to the studio. According to Roth, people were “just laughing at him,” which doesn’t seem all that surprising given the circumstances.
Then the trio of Tim Roth – “pasty-faced London boy,” as he calls himself in the video, Tupac Shakur, and actress Thandie Newton all rapped together. Roth reveals he doesn’t write his own rhymes, so he can’t recall what they were, and unfortunately Death Row Records has the recordings locked away for the time being. They’re probably the only remaining recordings of Tupac that Death Row hasn’t released posthumously.