Just before the pandemic, Kevin Hart and Chadwick Boseman were slated to star in a remake of the Sidney Poitier–Bill Cosby comedy vehicle Uptown Saturday Night. That movie’s inciting robbery incident was inspired by the events depicted in Fight Night. “It was kind of a sour spot attached to that world, and I didn’t want to touch it at all—being that me and Chadwick were so close,” Hart says. (Boseman died of colon cancer in 2020.) A longtime friend of Hart’s, Packer eventually suggested they tell the real story instead. “I said that the only way I would do it is if we could turn it into a drama,” Hart says. “That way I didn’t feel like I was doing what Chadwick and I were going to do. It was something different.”
That goes for the tone of the project, and for Hart’s performance as well. While the comedian has successfully ventured into dramatic work, it feels safe to say he’s never taken on a role as emotionally unpredictable as Chicken Man.
“You’re talking about a hustler, you’re talking about a true entrepreneur—a guy who was chaotic to a certain degree, but driven,” Hart says. “He was a visionary. He saw the city of Atlanta becoming so much more than what Atlanta probably intended for itself.” A workhorse performer and producer, Hart rather famously possesses a similar level of ambition, and you can feel him sinking his teeth into this character.
“I told him in the beginning of his career, ‘We know you’re funny, man; I want to see you do that drama,’” says Henson, herself a comedian turned dramatic actor. “I still think he has another layer left that we haven’t seen yet.”
“I’ve seen all of his work and I’ve been there for a lot of it…and this is a character that is more vulnerable than any character that Kevin has ever played before,” Packer says. “Chicken Man loves the streets because they feed him. He’s a numbers runner, and in order to be good at that, you’ve got to know people—be charismatic, be fast-talking. So when he gets into a place where his street life [and] his home life are all at odds, he is forced to take an unflinching look at himself and who he is in the mirror. It’s tough.”