I haven't had a problem with being typecast, but if I was only getting one type of role, I wouldn't mind. What I'm worried about is not working.

Music is always a part of my characters' make-up.

No one wakes up one day and decides they want to become a drug dealer or they want to be a stick-up kid. Those decisions are made after a series of events have happened in one's life.

My childhood was pretty colorful; I like to use the word turbulent. But it was a great time to grow up, the '70s and '80s in Brooklyn, East Flatbush. It was culturally diverse: You had Italian culture, American culture, the Caribbean West Indian culture, the Hasidic Jewish culture. Everything was kind of like right there in your face. A lot of violence, you know, especially toward the '80s the neighborhood got really violent, but it made me who I am, it made me strong.

I grew in a community where I saw the process of how one becomes a drug dealer or a gang banger or a stick-up kid. There's a series of events that happen. People don't just wake up and decide they wanna be that.

I am the epitome of the underdog. By societies standards I should have been dead a long time ago, and I was nobody's gangster, I wasn't a thug, I wasn't selling drugs on the corner - I was scared of that.

For me, my past characters been hard, the way they died, being murdered, the sadness that goes around, the death. It's a very hard thing to do.