After it was announced last week that Ice Cube had found the perfect stand-in for his younger self by looking in one of his extra bedrooms, F. Gary Gray’s N.WA. biopic, Straight Outta Compton, has moved on to casting its Dr. Dre and Eazy-E. Rumors that, as with Cube’s role, their children would also be stepping in have proven unfounded, as The Hollywood Reporter says Marcus Callender and Jason Mitchell have landed the parts.
Callender is a classically trained stage actor with a background in Shakespeare and Chekhov, giving him the familiarity with behind-the-scenes manipulations, gun talk, and physicians moonlighting in entertainment necessary to play Dr. Dre. Mitchell reportedly has no acting background at all and currently works in a kitchen, but he landed the role of Eazy-E after an “out-of-the-park screen test”—one that moved even the late rapper’s widow, Tomica Wright, to sign off on him, possibly because at least he isn’t one of the many kids Eazy fathered with other women. (That she knows of, anyway.)
Speculation now moves on to who will play Arabian Prince, Yella, and MC Ren—or it would, if anyone cared about those guys as much.
UPDATE: Jason Mitchell’s agent has contacted us to clarify that her client actually does have credits to his name, including roles opposite Mark Wahlberg in Contraband and again opposite Mark Wahlberg in Broken City. We will now assume this is all just a prelude to Mark Wahlberg being cast as Yella.