Actor Tyrese Gibson got real with BLACK ENTERPRISE about his new film, The System, and how it highlights the broken criminal justice system and issues of mass incarceration in America.
Tyrese plays a young soldier who returns from war and gets caught up in a drug bust. Once arrested, his character is recruited by authorities to go undercover in a notoriously dangerous prison
to investigate what is going on behind the scenes. When he discovers an underground prisoner fighting ring, the warden forces him to compete. He must fight to stay alive to win his freedom and take down the warden’s corrupt system.The role is unlike any other fans have seen Tyrese in before. While he’s no stranger to action films, the grime and grit in the intense fighting scenes might surprise some viewers.
Tyrese said that he dug deep to prepare for the role. He said that shooting the film inside an active prison in Mississippi opened his eyes to the harsh, real-life conditions that inmates face.
“We shot it in an active prison [with] real inmates in Mississippi,” Tyrese told BLACK ENTERPRISE.
“They were literally moving inmates out of prisons, sorry, out of their jail cells, they were cleaning them up, then we would go in there and use that same jail cell.”
“The smells, the energy, the kind of suppression depressive energy of just knowing that, yeah, we’re there to act, and we get to go home every night,” he continued.
“And they were in there sleeping in there. It was just crazy.”
With most of the inmates being Black and Brown, shooting the movie made Tyrese feel compelled to take action to combat America’s issue with mass incarceration.
“If I win the lottery, $700 million right now, I’m going to take 20 and put 500 different men and women, Black and Brown people, through law school,” he shared. “To become lawyers to become the judge or judges to get in certain positions politically.
“Because it’s really hard for us to change anything if we don’t have a seat at the table.”
Watch the full discussion below, and check out Tyrese’s new film The System with Terrence Howard, Jeremy Piven, and Lil Yachty.