Cynthia Erivo will play Afeni Shakur, Tupac Shakur’s mother, in “Snoop,” Universal Pictures’ Snoop Dogg biopic, The Hollywood Reporter reported Wednesday, Nov. 4. Universal has the film dated for Friday, Aug. 6, 2027, and calls it “the definitive biopic of artist, mogul and icon of gangsta rap, Snoop Dogg.”
Craig Brewer, who made “Hustle & Flow,” is directing from his rewrite of Joe Robert Cole’s original script, the studio said. “I’m being pretty bold with the choices and with the stories,” Brewer told Far Out Magazine in January.
The movie is shooting in Southern California now, Billboard reported, and Erivo arrives as a Tony, Grammy and Emmy winner with three Oscar nominations, according to THR. “As I stand here in front of you: Black, bald-headed, pierced, and queer, I can say I know a thing or two about being the other,” she said at the Los Angeles LGBT Center Gala in May 2024, Variety reported.
Who Was Afeni Shakur, the Panther Behind ‘Dear Mama’?
Afeni Shakur, born Alice Faye Williams, joined the Black Panther movement and later protected her son’s legacy. The Associated Press reported that she died in 2016 at 69.
In 1969, she was one of the Panther 21, Panthers accused of conspiring to shoot police officers and bomb police stations, and she decided to represent herself, against her comrades’ advice, author Santi Elijah Holley wrote in a TIME excerpt from his book “An Amerikan Family.” “I’m facing the same 350 years everyone else is facing, and I am not going out like that,” she later recalled thinking.
During her 1971 trial, she was pregnant with Tupac. When Justice John Murtagh accused the defendants of playing to the press over jail conditions, she answered, “The interest, Mr. Murtagh, is in assuring the life of my child,” Holley wrote.
Following her closing argument, the defendants were cleared of all 156 counts on May 13, 1971, Holley wrote. Tupac was born on June 16, a month after the acquittal.
Tupac’s 1995 tribute to his mother, “Dear Mama,” reached No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100, Billboard noted.
Inside the ‘Snoop’ Cast Around Cynthia Erivo’s Afeni Shakur
Jonathan Daviss, from “Outer Banks,” plays Snoop, with Myles Bullock Be as Dr. Dre, Lauren London as Beverly Tate, Snoop’s late mother, and Camron Jones as Tupac, Billboard and TheGrio reported. “After my brothers got to tell their story with ‘Straight Outta Compton,’ now it’s my turn,” Snoop said at Universal’s CinemaCon presentation in Las Vegas in April, TheGrio reported.
Algee Smith is Warren G and Tre Hale is Suge Knight, TheGrio reported Wednesday, with Laya DeLeon Hayes as Snoop’s wife, Shante Broadus, Olly Sholotan as Kurupt and Jonica Booth as The Lady of Rage. “If we gonna do a Snoop Dogg movie, I gotta get gangster with it,” Snoop told the CinemaCon crowd.
It’s the first film under Death Row Pictures’ overall deal with NBCUniversal, and Imagine Entertainment’s Brian Grazer and Allan Mandelbaum are producing it with Snoop and Death Row Pictures President Sara Ramaker, according to Universal. The studio says the film “will incorporate music from Snoop’s vast catalog.”
In August 2025, Snoop said on the “It’s Giving” podcast that his grandson’s question about a same-sex couple in Pixar’s “Lightyear” left him without an answer, Gayety reported. “It’s like, I’m scared to go to the movies now,” he said, according to E! News. In October 2025, Gayety reported that he’d made a surprise stop at GLAAD’s HBCU tour on HIV at Jackson State University. “It’s a beautiful thing that kids can have parents of all walks and be shown love,” he said there.
Cynthia Erivo Goes From Oz to Death Row Pictures
Erivo opened up about her sexuality in British Vogue in 2022, saying queer people still have to justify why they deserve equal treatment, People reported. “Rather than being chastised for that, we should be commended for being brave,” she said.
Her second run as Elphaba, “Wicked: For Good,” opened Nov. 21, 2025, and made $150 million in North America its first weekend, Playbill reported, though Oscar voters passed her over for the sequel in January, Gayety reported. “I hope it’s a bit of a love letter to everyone who feels different, who feels out of place, to all of the Black women who have walked into rooms and felt like they haven’t been welcomed,” she told Variety as the first film opened in 2024.
Her film of the Broadway drama “Prima Facie,” which she executive produced through her Edith’s Daughter banner, premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival, THR reported, and Billboard says she’s working on playing South African singer Miriam Makeba in “The Road Home.” “So to be here, legitimately 10 years later, having completed two of these films is a mind boggling thing,” she said of the “Wicked” films in a Wonderland conversation with Jonathan Bailey, Gayety reported.
Universal opens “Snoop,” with Erivo as Afeni, in theaters Aug. 6, 2027.
