Spike Lee and A$AP Rocky were the guests on the latest episode of the podcast Million Dollaz Worth Of Game, as the pair promote their upcoming crime thriller Highest 2 Lowest. During the interview, Rocky revealed that his co-star Denzel Washington started an impromptu freestyle rap battle while filming a scene, one that Rocky promptly lost.
“Denzel was such a great actor, he did something that wasn’t even on the script,” Spike Lee said. He started rapping from Nas’s Ilmatic. And it wasn’t scripted but he [A$AP Rocky] was rolling with it. And he says at one point, “What is it, a rap battle?”
“That was crazy because I did not know that that man was such a fan of hip-hop like that,” A$AP Rocky added. “I presumed that he was on some Miles Davis shit, maybe some Alice Coltraine […] Yo, your man came on set talking about Moneybagg Yo lyrics, NLE Choppa lyrics, DMX lyrics.”
“So in the scene, he just start freestyling like regular, so it caught me off guard, but I was fanning out the whole time. […] And just to see him freestyle, he got me up out of there. I lost a battle to Denzel.”
Highest 2 Lowest, directed by Spike Lee and written by Alan Fox, is a reinterpretation of the Japanese 1963 film High and Low. Washington leads as a music mogul who gets caught up in a kidnapping and ransom scheme; alongside Rocky, he’s joined by Ilfenesh Hadera, Jeffrey Wright, and Ice Spice in her acting debut. The film is out in theaters on August 15, and will be available for streaming on Apple TV+ on September 5.
