Mike Epps

Mike Epps mini-bio: Mike Epps grew up between Gary, Indiana, where he spent summers with his grandparents, and in Crenshaw, where he shared a house with eight siblings and his mother. A troublemaking class clown who admitted to spending four months in a juvenile center after a prank involving super glue. He entered a stand-up comedy contest at an Indiana Club called Seville's. His success on stage gave him the courage: to strike out on his own and move to Atlanta where he began making a name for himself at the Comedy Act Theater. The owner of the club suggested Epps move to New York to build his act, and within a week, Epps caught a Greyhound to Manhattan. He was 21 years old. While breaking into the city's conventional comedy clubs proved difficult, the Def Comedy Jam phenomenon stimulated an underground black comedy scene in which Epps excelled.

By 1995, Mike Epps ended up on the Def Comedy Jam tour and starred in two of HBO's Def Comedy Jam broadcasts. With a stop along the way to appear in actor Vin Diesel's directorial debut Strays (1996), Mike Epps was well on his way to becoming one of the bigger names in stand-up.

He appeared in an episode of The Sopranos in 1999, the same year the comedian learned that Ice Cube was to cast his co-star (effectively, Chris Tucker's replacement) in the Friday sequel Next Friday. Epps headed for Los Angeles, where he invited Ice Cube to catch his stand-up set. Impressed, the rapper-actor-producer asked Epps to try out for the part of Day-Day, which he landed after weeks of auditions.

Opening at Number One on the box-office charts, Next Friday was a breakthrough for the new actor, who was already familiar to much of the audience from his stand-up work. Epps played the ineffectual Day-Day, a smoked-out character stalked by his obsessive ex-girlfriend (Tamala Jones) and her brutish younger sister Baby D (Lady of Rage). Later that year, he had a cameo in DJ Pooh's 3 Strikes and supported Jamie Foxx in the action comedy Bait.

Mike Epps began 2001 with a voice role in the family comedy Dr. Dolittle 2 and finished the year with a featured role as comical pimp Baby Powder in How High, starring hip-hop artists Redman and Method Man. Epps played the bumbling thief to Ice Cube's bounty hunter in the action comedy All about the Benjamins and again re-teamed with the rapper-actor-filmmaker in the continuing Friday saga's latest entry Friday After Next (both 2002).

Other notable movie roles include The Fighting Temptations with Cuba Gooding, Jr. and R&B/Pop diva Beyoncé Knowles, Guess Who (the 2005 remake of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner with Bernie Mac), Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), the 2005 remake of The Honeymooners with Cedric the Entertainer, and Roll Bounce (playing one of two garbage men along with Charlie Murphy). Mike Epps recently had a small part in the song A Bay Bay by Hurricane Chris doing the Rick James move.

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