Comedian Chris Rock has just spent the past three days spruiking critically acclaimed new film Top Five across Sydney.
Funnily enough, that's more or less what he does in Top Five, too. Rock plays actor Andre Allen who is trying to turn his back on trashy comic blockbusters to tackle heavier roles and promoting his serious new film in New York with a journalist played by Rosario Dawson.
But the real Chris Rock says he's not seeking more serious roles himself. Instead he plans to return to stand-up comedy and hopes to hit the touring circuit again by the end of the year. Asked about his plans for after Top Five promotional duties, he told Fairfax Media, "I want to actually do stand-up, I want to get back to that. I would want to tour, I just got to get done selling this movie all over the world."
He says his drive for a return to the stage - he hasn't performed a stand-up tour since 2008 - is because "it energises me."
"It lets me know who I am," he says. "It helps me write - it's just fun, too. When you do a movie, you just work with so many people, it's such a machine, and when you do stand up, it's just you and a pad writing some jokes."
Rock, 50, began on the stand-up circuit in the early 1980s, and is still rated in various polls as one of the best stand-ups in the world. After joining Saturday Night Live in 1990, he has since racked up a lengthy list of credits on box-office mainstream hits like Grown Ups, the Madagascar franchise and Death at a Funeral and also drew nominations and widespread praise for TV show Everybody Hates Chris which he created and produced.
With Top Five, however, his third feature outing as a writer-director, he has really hit his stride. An accomplished and highly original comedy and love story, it's darkly hilarious, affecting, thought-provoking and challenging as it sensitively and intelligently tackles the realities of fame, race, the media and addictions.
Rock puts in a grippingly authentic performance as the tormented Allen - whose most famous role is playing a crime-fighting bear called Hammy - and says he can see why people might think the film might have an autobiographical bent. He says he took a different, tougher road to Allen's character, however, who got sucked into bad, albeit big, roles. "I definitely could have done my share of Hammy-types movies and I avoided it," he says.
However, he acknowledges that he may not get offered weightier roles. "Hey, we all want 'Call me for Inception.' That's not going to happen. I'm old enough to realise I'm never going to get that call. Chris Nolan is never calling me, like, you know 'Leo and Bradley Cooper and Matthew McConaughey are all on a Malaysian jet right now – I can't find them, what are you doing?' It's never happening."
"We all want better parts or whatever but you've got to make your own - so I wrote this and gave myself a real character that goes through real emotions. I gave myself something to play."
Rock also wrote Allen as a recovering alcoholic, saying he wanted his character to be flawed. Plus it sparks a bond with Dawson's character, New York Times journo Chelsea Brown, who is also getting over alcohol addiction.
"I've seen way too many movies when guys direct themselves and they have no faults and make themselves into perfect people," Rock says. "A lot of people get together because of their attributes, but there's something special about people that get together because of their faults - it's a deeper bond."
Earlier in the week, when speaking with Richard Glover at an event as part of the Spectrum Now presented by ANZ festival, he joked about how Hammy was "kind of like me as the zebra", referring to his role as Marty in the three Madagasar movies. But he also spoke of his drive to continuously mix things up.
"I just don't want to be boring," he said. "People don't realise that you can be a very competent comedian and get people laughing for long periods of time and say nothing they remember and just be boring as f---. People in this room have had sex with people they don't remember, I don't want to be one these people you have sex with and don't remember."
Top Five is out on March 12.
