Nick Cannon

Since his career began on Nickelodeon, Nick Cannon has had a hard time breaking the shackles of his childhood success. Quietly becoming a Hollywood power player, the 25-year-old loods to get his grown man on and leave the tricks for the kids.

Nick Cannon is a proud member of the 6 o’clock club. Every morning, usually in some anonymous Los Angeles hotel room, there’s a schedule that must be followed and it begins at the ungodly hour of 6AM. Thirty minutes of meditation and prayer follow his wake-up call. Then, once his mind and soul are at ease, he works the body. He used to box in the mornings, but now a few crunches and sets of push-ups are sufficient.

After a quick shower, Cannon hops into a chauffeured Ford Excursion and heads to his production company, Mr. Renaissance, located in downtown LA. During the commute, he makes phone calls, checks his e-mails and hopes that traffic isn’t too congested so he can make it to the office by 8AM. Not the typical morning routine for your average 25-year-old, but this is a day in the life of Nick Cannon.

“I’m a businessman,” says Cannon seated in a non-descript SUV inching through New York City traffic. “I’m somebody who’s out here to get his hustle on. I think people’s minds are embedded with Drumline and Nickelodeon. The perception is, ‘Oh, my kids like him.’ I’m trying to match the perception to who I really am.”

How the public views him is one of Cannon’s biggest hurdles, making him one of the most polarizing figures in the entertainment industry. In fact, on one of the message boards for film website imdb.com there’s a post titled, “Am I the only one who doesn’t HATE Nick Cannon?” With a career comprised mostly of teen-centered cable television gigs and movie roles, Nick is often perceived as just another goofy young actor—nothing more, nothing less. His attempts to branch out into more mature arenas like hip-hop with his 2003 self-titled album and action comedies like 2005’s Underclassmen have been disastrous; fueling critics’ claims that he lacks the credibility to succeed in either genre.

“The haters will come,” says Cannon. “They’re my gauge. If people hate me, then I must be doing something right. There’s a lot of envy in the entertainment industry. So when you have somebody thinking outside of the box, and doing things their own way, people tend to be like, ‘What’s so special about him?’”

“If people hate me, then I must be doing something right. There’s a lot of envy in the entertainment industry.”

Born in San Diego, California, Cannon was raised by his mother, Beth Hackett, and paternal grandmother until the age of 10. Concerned with her son’s questionable actions like stealing from liquor stores, mom shuttled young Nick east to live with his father James Cannon, a minister residing in Charlotte, North Carolina. The rules of the house were strict: no rap music and only one hour of television per day. Since his father worked late, Nick usually stayed up watching The Arsenio Hall Show.

“I would think, ‘Damn, I wish I could do that,’” he recalls. “My father had a televangelist show on public access, and I was on that. He thought I was funny, even though I was getting the material from Arsenio.”

It wasn’t until he moved back to San Diego for high school that Cannon’s comedic aspirations started coming to fruition. As a teen, he began performing stand-up comedy locally. However, his act hadn’t evolved past the cute “yo mama” jokes he told at his father’s New Man Ministry as a preteen.

“The first night I got on stage in a nightclub, I was 15 and I tried to do my 12-year-old material. The people booed me,” he says. “I didn’t want to do it anymore, but then I realized that I couldn’t quit. I went to the library the next day and just studied different things to talk about, different impressions, and looking up humor books. The next week, I ripped it with a new set.”

Graduating from Monte Vista High School in 1998, Cannon left home for the road to work the comedy circuit full time. The experience was invaluable and helped birth the mini-mogul inside the then 18-year-old. “If you’re doing stand-up, you are executive producer of your own show,” he says. “You create, you write, you get on stage with no props, no music, no script, you just go.”

Landing a spot as a warm-up act on the Nickelodeon sketch show, All That, Cannon eventually met a member of Will Smith’s Overbrook Entertainment production company and scored deal for a sitcom of his own with the WB network. A pilot was shot for Loose Cannon in 2001, but the show was never picked up.

“That was my first real check,” Cannon says of the pilot. “I blew it on Range Rovers, expensive rent in the Hollywood Hills, loaning [money to] family members and I went broke. Then a year-and-a-half later I got a deal at Nickelodeon [for The Nick Cannon Show].”

Cannon parlayed his stint at the kiddie network into starring roles in two successful teen comedies, 2002’s Drumline and 2004’s Love Don’t Cost a Thing. But after playing the goofy, mischievous teenager on cable and film, the budding actor feared he was being pigeonholed and decided to take his career in a new direction. Cannon’s multimedia image makeover includes tackling more mature roles, a hit MTV variety show Wild N’ Out, and a sophomore album, Stages due out this summer via his label, Can I Ball Records. Consider it a well thought out plan by a guy who teeters between being both an artist and corporate dealmaker—but leans more towards the latter.

“Nick has a real vision of what he wants to accomplish,” says manager, Blue Williams. “He’s not a slave-driver but he’s not going to wait. If he has an idea, looks up and no one is moving on it, he’s going to take the reins himself.”

This fall, Cannon will showcase the depth of his acting chops alongside Sir Anthony Hopkins, Harry Belafonte and Demi Moore in Bobby, a historical drama recounting the assassination of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. Written and directed by Emilio Estevez, the film finds Cannon playing one of 22 people in the vicinity of the Commander of Chief’s murder. That will be followed by The Hawk, a fight film he co-scripted and is also producing. He hopes both projects will change how casting directors and the public assess him—not to mention, erase the aftertaste of last year’s Underclassmen, which was Cannon’s first box office flop.

“Bobby gives me the opportunity to do something I haven’t done,” he says. “People are used to seeing me be funny or in a romantic comedy, but this feels like an epic. When you see my character, you don’t see Nick Cannon, you see this character. Whatever I do with business, music or comedy, I want people to know that I take my acting very seriously.”

“When you see [me], you don’t see Nick Cannon, you see this character. People are used to seeing me be funny but I want people to know that I take my acting very seriously.”

On a sunny afternoon in New York City, Nick hops out of his tinted-windowed vehicle and into the lobby of a chic midtown Manhattan hotel. Wearing a black Adidas warm-up jacket with matching sneakers and a gaudy gold dookie rope chain, he looks like Run-DMC’s younger nephew. Once upstairs though, he makes the very non-rapper choice of eschewing the Heineken and champagne stocked mini bar for a weight-gain supplement. There’s no crew in the next room leeching off him and no blunts will be smoked here. Defying every rapper cliché, Cannon has found it difficult fitting into the world of hip-hop.

“Trying to be in the hip-hop game is probably the hardest thing you can ever imagine,” he says, sitting on the edge of his room’s kitchen counter, legs mindlessly swinging back and forth like a hyperactive kid. “You are going into a business, or a world, where it’s all about keeping it real. It’s all about how raw and gritty you are and here comes this kid from children’s television, a child star actor [who] wants to be a hip-hop artist.”

Cannon’s rap career got off to an inauspicious start in 2003 with the release of his self-titled debut album. (We’ll ignore his stint in the kiddie duo, Da Bomb Squad, which opened for Will Smith). There was the pedestrian “Your Pops Don’t Like Me,” a PG-13 version of K-Solo’s 1990 classic “Your Mom’s in My Business,” and the questionable R. Kelly collaboration “Gigolo.” “My grandmother said, ‘Ain’t that the man that had the little case?’” says Nick with a laugh. “When you think about it, it is the kid from Nickelodeon doing a record with R. Kelly.”

Despite working with Pharrell, Diddy and Kellz, Cannon’s debut sold only 200,000 copies. Apparently, skirt-chasing records were too much of a jump for the Nickelodeon set. Not even Cannon’s own label took him seriously. “Jive saw me as that Nickelodeon kid,” he says. “They even coined me in their minds as, ‘the Black Aaron Carter.’”

With his music career careening towards oblivion, Cannon decided to share more of his real life on his sophomore disc. “When I went into making this music, I was like, ‘I’m just going to do me,’” he says. “Sometimes I’ll think of a hot punch line and be like, ‘It would be crazy if I said, I carry more toasters than Sears and Roebuck’s.’ But I don’t have guns with me. You want your creativity to flow but also be as real as possible. I think that’s my lane. I’m keeping it as real as I can, being me.”

“I tell him all the time, ‘Don’t worry about street cred,’” adds Williams. “‘Kids in the ghetto respect you because you make them laugh and they know you have money. Ain’t nobody scared you going to shoot them. So what?’ He can be in a ghetto and not get robbed because cats fuck with him.”

“This one girl saw the video and didn’t get the abortion. She was pregnant with twins. This song kind of opened the door for two kids to be born. At the end of the day, no record sales could top that.”

In summer 2005, Cannon released the introspective single “Can I Live,” a tribute to his mother who at one time contemplated aborting him. The song and accompanying video were unlike anything on BET’s 106 & Park countdown. Immediately attracting controversy, it features a pregnant Tatyana Ali (best known as Ashley from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) running away from an abortion clinic. But Cannon still maintains the song wasn’t meant to be championed by either side of the heated debate.

Did you think “Can I Live” would get that much attention?

Nah, man. But by the time I was shooting the video, I knew maybe it would be controversial. People from Congress called me. The head of a pro-life foundation contacted me. They purchased 10,000 copies of the video and put them in pregnancy centers. BET embraced it but a lot of other places stayed away. Even MTV, who is supposed to be so edgy, were like, “We’re not touching it. That video is a little too risqué for us.”

Is that because the video can be seen as “pro-life” and maybe didn’t fit MTV’s political views?

Maybe. I really think it didn’t fit with the image MTV had of me at the time. This is when Wild N’ Out first started and they wanted the funny over-the-top Nick Cannon. At the same time, I’ve got a record out where I’m all serious and talking about abortion. It’s like, “We’ll wait till the next single.”

Do you feel used by the pro-life side? With those 10,000 videos, they used your video to push their agenda.

It didn’t really bother me too much. It can be interpreted any way. What really touched me was this one girl on her way to getting an abortion saw the video and didn’t get the abortion. On her first ultrasound, she found out she was pregnant with twins. That’s kind of cool. Regardless of people’s beliefs, this song kind of opened the door for two kids to be born. At the end of the day, no record sales could top that.

Cannon’s maturation both on screen and on wax is telling. Just look at the way he treats his break-up and one-sided war of words with actress/singer Christina Milian like distracting tabloid fodder.

“Our relationship was one of the more successful relationships in the public eye because we didn’t over-saturate it,” he says with a straight face. “When it did end, it wasn’t like this huge break-up. We’ll always remain friends. We’re still friends to this day. If I ever have another high-profile relationship I would probably do it exactly the same way.”

Although Milian refused to comment for this article, her record “Who’s Gonna Ride,” is believed to be a thinly-veiled stab at her former beau as she sings, “You ain’t nothing but a buster/Still I found it so hard to believe I touched ya.” Although Cannon is never called out by name, his manager believes the song is just a publicity stunt.

“The first time [Nick] heard the record he was laughing because he was like, ‘I like the beat. It’s hot.’ He didn’t trip about it,” says Williams. “It wasn’t a break-up where his heart was broken or where he felt like his world was coming to an end. They were two friends who decided that at this stage the relationship wasn’t working so let’s keep it moving.”

As the sun begins to descend into the New York skyline Cannon prepares for a late night session at Sony Studios to finish mastering his album. He’s known to micromanage his music career like one of his movie projects. “It’s almost like being the CEO of a company,” he says. “You’ve got to be involved with everything from craft services to the editing. In my projects, I really try to make sure that I produce from point A to point B to make sure that everything runs smoothly and that my vision comes across.”

But what vision does Cannon want to project? It’s tough to simultaneously be a serious actor, a clown prince of comedy, and a business-minded suit. Even harder, is the prospect of following up a serious song about abortion with a superficial ode to booties like “Dime Piece.” Despite these conflicting realities, Cannon says it’s the doubt in people’s minds that keeps his fire going.

“It’s like, ‘Can I ball?’” he asks. “I really want to let that question out.” He repeats it again for emphasis. “I really want to get that question out there. ‘Can I ball?’”

Excusing himself, Cannon hops off the counter and the dookie rope chain around his neck barely moves. Walking out the room with a confident swagger, it’s as if he’s already answered his own question. Yes, he most certainly can.


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