EXCLUSIVE: Charles Stone III Talks Directing Prime Video’s New Movie, ‘The Underdoggs’
Director Charles Stone III is gearing up to release his next movie, The Underdoggs on Prime Video tomorrow, January 26. Starring Snoop Dogg, Tika Sumpter, and more, the movie follows an ex-professional football player, who is sentenced to community serive where he has to coach a rag-tag pee-wee football team.
During Stone’s chat, he talked the meaning of the word “underdog” to him, the characters in his new movie, and so much more. Check out what he had to say below.
What would you say was an “underdog” moment for you?
“I guess I could say professionally as an adult in the business, to date myself, when I started directing music videos back in 1989. But I recall wanting to direct music videos. I had just graduated from art school in 1988, and I sent my work to a management company that managed the band Living Color, the rock band, and I remember the manager saying, ‘Look, I just can’t give you $60,000 and expect you to have the know how to do it, but we’ll keep you in mind.’ And I stayed the course and I continued to create like music video ideas in my head and writing them down and just mentally staying the course.
And then six months later, they offered me $10,000 to do a music video for the song called “Funny Vibe” off of the Vivid album Living Color, and that got my feet in the door. They always say, ‘Don’t wait. Be prepared so when you do get called, be ready,’ like for actors, for all of us, if you love your craft. So, but I was considered an underdog, I thought, back then and had to push through.”
Do any movies come to mind when you think about the “underdog” mentality?
“I’m glad you brought that up ‘cause it made me think about Drumline. It’s about marching bands. Like people go marching bands? And, on top of that, specifically historic Black college university style of marching. And as much as I love the story and doing it and stuff, there was a concern that it wasn’t gonna take to the quote, unquote ‘mainstream,’ which seems to be the barometer of success is if all the public takes it. Sure enough, it did. But they were conservative with the amount of money they wanted to spend on it, ‘cause they were all preparing for what they thought would be a very limited run, you know what I’m saying? And it broke through the ceiling. But there was definitely the underdog mentality applied to that.”
Can you talk a little bit about Tika Sumpter’s character, Cherise?
“With the Cherise character, there are all these moments where all the crazy stuff is going on around her. ‘Cause she’s not expecting what’s happening. She’s already having to wrangle the kids, right? There’s that. And also, their cuss words and all that. But there are so many moments, especially the moment where Mike Epps’ character is — Kareem’s giving a speech. His speech, ’cause he’s now in the role of the coach. And you just have to cut away to her, ’cause she’s trying to handle [laugh] the situation that’s already dire because Snoop character is not there for the big game and all that. And here is Kareem doing what Kareem does. And she’s trying to like, ‘It’s all good,”’ and then he’s saying foul stuff, and she’s like, you know. And then she elbows him at one point ’cause he goes overboard. There’s a lot of those moments. Or when he gives his first speech to the kids, and she’s sitting there on the bleachers like, ‘Oh my god, how am I –’. It’s what makes the comedy all the more funny.
So, her character balance’s out Snoop Dogg’s Jaycen?
“It’s the other half. It’s the yin to the yang of like, he’s doing what he’s doing, and then she’s like trying to handle it and react, and it’s great.”
For our final question, this is a black-directed film, mostly Black cast, black leads, would you consider this to be a Black film?
“As my mother would say, whew, you gonna make me want to smoke a cigarette. Yeah, that’s heavy, but very real and very current. Yeah, look, there’s a cat from the ooh, ’20s, I guess, and ’30s, W. E. B. Du Bois, who had this term, the double consciousness, which that people of color are both known to be Black Americans and Americans. So, we had this duality that we have to deal with. Now, some choose to, some don’t. In this case, the first answer is that yeah, this is a movie for everybody. But it’s also celebrating a culture that is with people of color. That is African American and so on. And Latinx as well, so. But yeah, it’s very much, it’s both. We just have to unfortunately straddle, and we strive for, we try to do that with the word ‘woke’ but then folks tried to really make that toxic.
But I refer to the word ‘woke’ as mindful. The world needs to be more mindful of the various cultures, and that it’s all American. It’s not Black history, it’s American history. So that goes for this movie that it’s a universal tale, coming-of-age story about a basically middle-aged dude, [laugh] you know what I mean? And that’s universal.”
Photo by Eric Charbonneau/Getty Images
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity