Law & Order: SVU star Ice-T says he was ambushed into making a prominent appearance in Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair. “I didn’t even know I was in a movie,” Ice-T told us when we congratulated him after the Cinema Society screening last night. “Hanging around with Chris, he always has a video camera, and he’s like, ‘I’m gonna ask you some questions about hair.’” Ice says the filming occurred at least three years ago, and since he and Rock are friends, he was candid. And hilarious. “I talked a lot, but that turned out to be, uh, funny, I guess.”
While he wears his hair short now, the rapper’s longtime ponytail was created with the kind of chemical relaxers detailed in Good Hair. “I had a perm and when guys have it straightened, they put the rollers in their head, you know, so you get that Super Fly look,” Ice explained. When he was in high school in L.A., he used to actually wear rollers to school, which, believe it or not, was a sign of toughness. “See, there’s a level of gangster where you can do things that you’re really saying: ‘Don’t say nothin’ about it,’” he says. “It’s like the biker who might put a ribbon in his hair, like: ‘What? I’m waiting on you.’ So you have to have a certain level of credibility, but a lot of the cats were wearing perms and had rollers in their hair and we would get away with it.”
Ice pointed out that TMZ misread this very gangsta code when they spotted him wearing a pink suit in Vegas last year. “I had on a pink suit; a clean, pink Versace suit. And they were like, Ice-T lost his street cred. And I’m like, do you know how much street cred you got to have to wear a pink suit?”
