By Dov Kornits
When we get on the line to speak with Marlon Wayans – the youngest, and arguably best looking, male member of the infamous comedy family behind such groundbreakers as In Living Color, Don’t Be a Menace To South Central While Drinking Your Juice In The Hood and I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, and popular hits like Scary Movie and White Chicks, and an actor in his own right in films such as Requiem For A Dream and GI Joe: Rise Of Cobra – we have ten minutes, so we get straight into it. There’s one stumbling block though: the phone line is very crackly, and we tell him as much. “It’s okay, I grew up in the ghetto, it’s fine,” Wayans says in total deadpan.
Speaking to him is like a comedy routine in itself, and it follows when we ask him why he is conducting the interview on his mobile phone from a hospital. “Yeah, my friend is in the hospital, he has a staph infection,” the actor replies. “I thought it was chlamydia, but I think that you have to have sex to get that…who knows what he’s doing.”
We’re given an audience with Marlon Wayans because his latest work as producer, co-writer and star – the feature film spoof, Fifty Shades of Black – is about to become available to Australian audiences via digital release and DVD. As the title clearly indicates, the film takes as its huge target one of the biggest literary success stories of our time, which was turned into box office gold last year. So, did Marlon Wayans read Fifty Shades Of Grey? “I read about, ah, I guess, three quarters of it, and then I threw up,” is his reply.
So to what does he credit the fact that millions of women ate up the book and the film? “I think that each time you take a woman on a helicopter, of course she’s going to be like, ‘Oh my god, this is so exciting, we’re in a helicopter!’” At this point of the conversation, the line crackles even more, making it difficult to make out Wayans’ one-liners. Did he worry about any legal ramifications in his satire? “The lawyers from Universal marked the whole script up and told us what we could and could not do. And I wasn’t going to go against a giant like Universal,” he answers, referring to the studio who produced the Fifty Shades Of Grey movie, and illustrating that there’s nous behind all of the craziness.
And did his brothers help out in any way on the film? “They’re my brothers, so they’re always going to have some input, but this is really a solo effort. I can’t blame them for any of this.” Before we could ask Marlon Wayans whether he was named after Brando, and what he makes of Hilary Clinton and, more interestingly, Donald Trump, the line becomes incomprehensible…
You’ll just have to check out Fifty Shades Of Black for more of Marlon Wayans’ unique brand of comedy, and despite its across-the-board negative reviews, believe us, it’s not that bad; it does what it says on the box, which is a skewering of tropes and clichés, and will prove more enjoyable than Fifty Shades Of Grey itself a sizeable chunk of the audience.
Fifty Shades Of Black is available now on DVD and Digital.
