Wesley Snipes made an early career appearance in Michael Jackson’s short film/music video “Bad,” in which he played the villain “Mini Max.”
The 18-minute short film was directed by Martin Scorsese and followed an inner-city gang. Snipes played Mini Max, the leader of the street gang who confronts Jackson’s character after he returns to his old neighborhood. The conflict leads to a dance showdown between the two sides.
In 2017, Snipes appeared on Conan and revealed that he beat out a very famous face to the role. “Me and Prince were auditioning together, and I blew Prince out of the water,” Snipes explained. “Michael had told Prince that he had the role, and then he met me.”
He admitted the “Billie Jean” singer thought the actor was actually in a gang in real life. “He didn’t know that I was a trained thespian, he added.
”At the time, the great Michael hadn’t spent very much time in the ‘hood.” Snipes laughed at Conan O’Brien at the time.
Prince Had A Very Different Version Of Events
In a 1997 interview with VH1, Prince had a different version of events, claiming the song was originally a duet between the two icons. “The first line in that song is, ‘Your butt is mine,’ so I was saying, ‘Who gonna sing that to whom? Because you sure ain’t singing it to me, and I sure ain’t singing it to you.’ So right there we got a problem.”
The West Side Story-inspired music video premiered during prime time on CBS in the TV special Michael Jackson: The Magic Returns on August 31, 1987.
In Jackson’s 1988 autobiography Moonwalk, Jackson explained that the song is about a “kid from a bad neighborhood who gets to go away to a private school. He comes back to the old neighborhood when he’s on a break from school and the kids from the neighborhood start giving him trouble.”
“Bad” charted and hit the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 on October 10, 1987, and peaked at number one on October 24 that same year.
