Are you ready for an all-black “Expendables” spinoff that features some of the toughest black action heroes of the last two decades—guys like Terry Crews, Wesley Snipes, Michael Clarke Duncan, Idris Elba, Samuel L. Jackson and Carl Weathers?
That’s the juicy idea that Terry Crews threw out when he sat down with The Huffington Post to talk about his role in “The Expendables 2,” the action movie extravaganza that stars just about every buff dude in Hollywood born before 1980. Crews, 44, was imagining what would would happen if Hollywood greenlit a black version of the movie franchise.
“We could do a black version; I could see it. There’s really no end,” said Crews, everybody’s favorite TV father in “Everybody Hates Chris.” “And we’re also talking about the nature of film right now, where one guy really doesn’t carry a movie. You have to give fans more for their money.”
Crews said he realizes he got a part in the first “Expandables” because Wesley Snipes was unavailable because of his tax problems—but Crews isn’t complaining about it.
“I’m going to be real honest: I know for a fact that in the first “Expendables” it should’ve been Wesley [Snipes],” he said. “And I give him his props. Wesley Snipes broke so much new ground in a lot of ways when you talk about being an actor, from ‘New Jack City’ to the ‘Blade’ series. It was just a thing where he couldn’t do [“The Expendables”] because of some of the things that he was going through at the time.
“I was like the fourth choice, and I don’t mind being the fourth choice. The matter was, I really took advantage of every little bit that I could do. And Sly [Stallone] told me, ‘I know that you’re new to this whole thing, but I’m going to make you an action star. And as long as you give me 100 percent, I got your back.’ And I gave everything I had, even more so in this one. It’s funny, you never know where you’ll end up and the things you do. You just can’t explain it sometimes. And now I’m in this spot, and I ain’t giving it up.”
Of all the aging action stars in the movie, Crews said he was the most excited to work with Chuck Norris.
“‘Enter The Dragon’ is one of my favorite movies of all time,” Crews said. “And to actually work with a man who fought Bruce Lee in a movie just blew my mind. Chuck, he goes so far back to the ’70s and that era of action films, so it was such an honor and so cool.”
In addition to “Expendables 2,” the former NFL defensive lineman has parts this year in HBO’s “The Newsroom,” NBC’s reality competition “Stars Earn Stripes,” and the forthcoming installment in the “Scary Movie” franchise.
