Remember when Biggie used to eat 'sardines for dinner'? According to Wayne Barrow, director of Notorious, the Biggie Smalls biopic, Biggie would come to Junior’s for dessert.

At underground 'Soul Power' parties, Biggie and his friends honed their freestyle skills, earning Biggie the nickname of 'Mayor of Saint James Place'. Though his former 'one-room shack' has been renovated extensively since Biggie lived there, you can still walk the same streets as the legendary rapper and check out the front of the building where he and his mother Voletta lived.Īcross the street from Biggie's childhood home is the closed-but-standing Orient Temple, where Biggie did some of his earliest performances. The production held an open casting call last fall in the hope of finding the next Notorious B.I.G., ne Christopher Wallace, the generously built East Coast rapper who was killed in an unsolved Los Angeles drive-by in 1997.Biggie grew up on the third floor of this Clinton Hill building. Mackie (“Brother to Brother”) will play rival rapper Tupac Shakur, while Bassett (“Akeelah and the Bee”) will play Biggie’s mother Voletta Wallace. Luke (“Catch a Fire”) will play Biggie record producer Sean “Diddy” Combs, who off-screen is an executive producer on the film. (“Soul Food”), it goes into production this month and is set for release in January. the Notorious B.I.G., in its upcoming biopic 'Notorious.' REUTERS/Fred Prouser/Filesĭerek Luke, Angela Bassett and Anthony Mackie also have been cast in the movie, the art-house studio said.

Fox Searchlight has hired Jamal Woolard, a Brooklyn-based rapper, to play late rap icon Biggie Smalls, a.k.a.

is shown on stage at the 1996 Soul Train Music Awards in Los Angeles in this file photograph.

The notorious big grave