Nick Cannon Says He Turned Down T.I.’s Role in ‘ATL’ for a Bigger Bag

Nick Cannon is a man of many talents, and sometimes, he might be too busy to do everything that’s offered to him. Recently, the 42-year-old revealed he was supposed to do T.I.’s lead role in the 2006 classic movie ATL.

Speaking with HipHopDX, Nick Cannon was first asked how Tip auditioned for Cannon’s role in the movie Drumline, released in 2002. This stems from earlier this week when T.I. went on Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay podcast to reveal that he was “reading for Nick Cannon’s part” but couldn’t commit to learning drums at the time.

Cannon confirmed that he already knew this, stating that he and T.I. bring up the story often.

“Yeah, I know about that,” Cannon states. “I’ve interviewed T.I., and he’s interviewed me a couple times and we always talk about that story… he gets mad at me like, ‘Why you always got to bring that up?’”

The crazy part is Nick Cannon also was offered the lead role in ATL, which ended up being T.I.’s first time starring in a major feature film. 

Cannons explains, “I don’t know if he elaborated on this when he was talking to Shannon Sharpe, I was supposed to do ATL.“

He then points out that both films were based around Dallas Austin, the Grammy Award-winning producer, and musician who also produced both films.

Cannon said before pointing out that both ATL and Drumline were about Grammy Award-winning musician, songwriter, and producer Dallas Austin, who also produced both films.

“The Drumline story is about him being a drummer and not knowing how to read music and being in a band, and ATL was this story about him going to a roller skating rink called Jelly Beans. I remember [Dallas] had both of the scripts for Drumline and at the time, ATL was called Jelly Beans. He was like, ‘Yo, we gonna do both of these. We’re gonna do Drumline first and then we’re gonna do Jelly Beans.’”

Ultimately, Cannon had to decide because he was presented with another opportunity at the same time, and the money was talking better over there.

“It got brought to me after Drumline that they were gonna go with it, but I got presented two rollerskating movies: it was Jelly Beans and Roll Bounce. And the bag was a little bigger over at Roll Bounce with less days work; so I chose that one. ‘Cause I was doing another movie, I was like, ‘I could do this one and still complete the other project. Or I could go back down to Atlanta for a few months and not get paid as much.’ I did it for the bag.”

However, Cannon has absolutely no regrets on his end. He states, “Clearly, the same way that you can’t see T.I. in my role [in Drumline], you can’t see me in his role. He bodied it. That [role] was made for him, so it’s amazing how the universe works.”

Cannon recently launched his new daily morning radio show called The Daily Cannon, which fans can tune in to via Amp, the live radio app from Amazon.