When it came to Spiral, though — the new humor-laced Saw spin-off Rock lobbied Lionsgate to let him make — the 56-year-old comedian and actor had no misgivings about putting on a badge to play a Metro City detective.
“I never really starred as a cop, and it’s almost like a comedian rite of passage, especially Black comedians,” Rock tells Yahoo Entertainment (watch above), pointing to Eddie Murphy (Beverly Hills Cop), Martin Lawrence (Bad Boys), Chris Tucker (Rush Hour) and Kevin Hart (Ride Along). “It’s such a thing. [But] I didn’t want to do it like everybody else. I’m like, ‘Hmmm. What if it had a little horror in it?
“But no, I did not second guess playing a cop at all.”
Rock’s self-described “weird relationship with the cops” as a Black man does reverberate through Spiral, though. While the Saw franchise’s longtime killer Jigsaw targeted law enforcement plenty of times in the past with his morality tests and death traps,
the Jigsaw copycat killer in Spiral exclusively targets cops, some of whom have shot unarmed men. It all makes the social justice element of Spiral — which was written in 2018 and filmed in summer, 2019, a year before the racial reckoning that followed the police killing of George Floyd — feel more pointed today. Or as IndieWire film critic David Ehrlich put it,
“Saw is woke now.”
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