Ice breaker

By Brian Courtis
June 30, 2005
Ice-T as Detective Odafin Tutuola.

Ice-T as Detective Odafin Tutuola.

Ruh-spect! Talk to the man and you will know that's what it's about. Never mind the gangsta rap, the scowl you always get when Detective Fin slides into view, or that hip-hop rhyme on street crime, bad cops, pimps, their ho's, and the stuff with which he outrages feminists around the world and sends a thrilled shudder and a spin though American television's conservative commentators.

Trouble is, what do you call him? Mr T? Mr Ice? How about Tracy or Mr Marrow, as in Tracy Marrow, the name he was given at birth in New Jersey in 1958? "A real boy-named-Sue situation," he has said. "I learned to fight real quick."

Ice-T quickly sorts out the formalities. Between rehearsals for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, brushing aside the interruptions from gofers, he is instant charm. Lines well learnt. "G'day Brian, it's Ice . . . howya doin? It's eight at night Thursday. What can I tell ya?"

Where do we begin? Ice, who became known as the father of gangsta music, lost both parents by the time he was 12 and was sent to live with an aunt in Los Angeles. It was no easy 'hood but he adapted. At high school he gained his nickname from an enthusiasm for the work of Iceberg Slim, a former LA pimp and cult ghetto poet. After two years in the army he turned to low-level hustling, gang life, pimping and trying to keep away from the law. It was a hellraiser's existence, given pause only when his Porsche 914 was ripped apart in a car accident in 1986.

"I thought I'd died," he says. "I was in the hospital for 10 weeks immobilised. I didn't have anybody come into the hospital; I didn't really have people that loved me. I was kinda like an outlaw, you know, in the streets, causing trouble.

"Sometimes when you come really close to death, you say to yourself, 'Wow, that would've been my whole life, right there'. And, man, I knew I didn't want my life to end like that. I started making changes. Sometimes you need to stop, you need to really get a chance, get a grasp of what's going on. But when you're moving really fast, you almost can't see yourself."

As those he knew either disappeared into prisons or were killed, Ice-T found new talents. His gritty, articulate rhymes and music shot him to hip-hop stardom by the late 1980s. It was his song Cop Killer, recorded with his rap-metal group Body Count in the early '90s, that gained him notoriety, a feud with LA police chief Daryl Gates and the angry disapproval of actor Charlton Heston and president George Bush. But through music, writing and a cool natural talent as an actor, he has proved a more than successful survivor.

Ironically, he has probably reached his biggest audience as Law & Order: SVU detective Odafin "Fin" Tutuola, an unlikely role for which he has shown unexpected subtleties.

"When I first got on the show, I don't know what the writers were thinking," he says. "I mean, they came, they named me Otis, then Tutuola. They had me in suits. My background was supposed to be some type of guy that went to law school but never took the bar, whose parents were black . . . I mean, I think they just overthought it."

The younger audience the producers were hoping to attract already knew how Ice-T felt about cops and it didn't need much adjustment. "So it was, 'Ice, show us how to play a cop . . . if you don't like us, show 'em how to do it right'. And that's basically what I did. I just kind of took the character and just started putting myself into the lines and people started to dig it."

Was the welcome mat out for him on the set?

"I was kinda nervous because the show had been on a year," he says. "I came in for the last episode of the first season. It was crazy. I mean everybody was cool. It's kinda like getting on to a moving train, you know, you're with a group of people that have been together a year and here you come."

It seems he clicked immediately with (co-star) Richard Belzer, the actor who has played mildly eccentric detective John Munch for seven years, a winner since his days of Homicide. Ice-T felt the fact they were both nightclub entertainers, that Belzer was a controversial Jewish comic and he was a controversial black singer, helped them connect.

"Belzer is a really nice guy. He's a very nice guy. I mean, let's be honest, neither of us are actors by trade, so I think us knowing that we're coming from another place, we both kinda help each other and we grow."

It's intriguing to wonder how playing the cop has changed the man the LAPD once saw as a demonic icon. He is now 47, father of two and, no matter what is sung, recorded or said, a very rich, enormously successful performer, the image of much the 'hood would have resented. "Has it changed my attitude about police at all?" he responds. "I'd say, yeah. I have a respect for, you know, the heaviness of the job, especially for the people that work in this type of a unit, or homicide, who've got to go through it day and night and then go home to the kids. But then I also still have my same views about police . . . that this is an honourable job and when you step out of line you become an arch criminal because people are entrusting their lives to you."

Ice-T does have respect for the writers of Law & Order: SUV, the fact they are such sticklers for detail, from the street jargon to police and medical terms. "Sometimes I'll be reading scripts, and I'm like, 'This really happened?' And they'll go, 'Yeah', and then tell you where it happened. It's crazy out there."

And has it changed his message to the audience?

"I try to motivate people by myself; I mean, that's all I can really do," he says. "What I try to do is say, 'I'm from there, I should be in a holding-tank somewhere, I made about as many mistakes as you possibly could make, I still got an attitude, but I still managed to make it, I'm doing good and maybe you can learn from that.' Because kids need role models.

"In the end, though, it's the music that keeps me sane, you know. I do this for a job, but the music is my real expression. That's my canvas . . . where I still paint my art."

Law & Order: SVU screens on Wednesdays at 9.30pm on Channel Ten. Ice-T is performing in Melbourne next week.
