Martin Lawrence Talks 'Big Momma,' 'Bad Boys' and Comedy Career

By Scott Huver

Before deciding on comedy as his true calling, Martin Lawrence seriously considered a career as a professional boxer, even becoming a Golden Gloves contender. He credits that pugilistic discipline for equipping him with the resilience and tenacity necessary to survive in the entertainment industry.

“Boxing gave me the training, the consistency and, most importantly, the focus,” Lawrence tells Variety. “To study your craft, to want to be good at your craft and to be excellent at it — you can reach them at heights and just be the best that you could be.”

Lawrence went the distance and then some in his 30-plus-year career in stand-up comedy, television and film. He’ll celebrate those accomplishments April 20 with one of the industry’s most iconic honors: a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The tribute wasn’t a prize he’d always had his eye on, but he admits it’s one he’d contemplated in recent years, especially after getting that other equally permanent mark of achievement, cementing his hand- and footprints in the courtyard of the TCL Chinese Theater.

“I didn’t think about the star being something that I would get one day,” Lawrence says. “I thought the hands and feet was it, and then I started thinking, it’d be nice to get a star one day, have my imprint in Hollywood like that.” After cultivating such an expansive body of work — from his “Def Comedy Jam” days to his eponymous ’90s sitcom to movie roles in franchises like “Bad Boys” and “Big Momma’s House” — he says receiving the star “feels like I’m being respected, I’m being shown love and I’m being honored.”

“He’s earned it many times over,” says his “Bad Boys 2” co-star Gabrielle Union. “He played my big brother and literally treated me like a little sister for the last 20-plus years. I’m just incredibly proud of him — I’m just surprised that he didn’t have [a star] already.”

Despite his comedic pedigree, Lawrence freely admits he’s not the funniest person in his raucous family. “My brother Robert, he’s probably the funniest, but my grandmother, Nana, she was so funny, and my mother,” he says. “So I just took to comedy early on. I was always clowning, and then as I started getting older, I was able to make my friends laugh in the streets.” As a teen, he attracted crowds in his native Washington, D.C., area to watch his merciless takedowns — which onlookers loved even when he targeted them.

A fateful late-night cable viewing of “Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip” cemented his future path. “I was supposed to be in bed getting ready for school,” he remembers. “I went to my mother and I told her, ‘This is what I want to do, acting and stand-up.’ And she said, ‘Well, that’s a hard field that you want to go into. That’s very difficult.’”

“I told her, ‘Mama, either I make it in comedy or I don’t make it at all.’ And then she gave me her blessing. So I gave myself no options.”

Lawrence says that when he decided making people laugh was his only way forward, he knew he would have to attack a career in comedy with laser-focus. “I felt like if I followed my path that I was on and keep trying and get in doors and opportunities and seize the moments that I could do something,” he says.

He honed his innate talent on comedy club stages. “The first time I ever got on, I bombed bad! And I thought I would never get on stage again,” he laughs. “But I knew I was better than that.” He made a point of carefully studying the nuances of the best professional comics “until I got the urge and the courage to get back on stage.”

He swiftly ascended the ranks of other hopefuls from rookie comic to emcee to headliner. He also took an improv class that comedy superstar Eddie Murphy, another role model, had reportedly taken, plus joined a traveling musical theater group, and nabbed a starring role in his 10th-grade play. Honing his particular comedy style — often raunchy and always real — Lawrence learned early on to trust his instincts.

“A lot of the comedy club owners were telling me I was too vulgar — I couldn’t say this, I couldn’t say that,” he says. “They wanted me to change my act and probably be more like Bill Cosby, safe and clean and whatever. I wanted to be like Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy. I wanted to say what I wanted to say, and that’s what I stuck to. I believed in it, and I believed there was an audience for it — and there was.”

“If Eddie could do it, if Richard could do it, I believed I could do it,” he says. “And nobody could tell me I couldn’t.”

Along the way, Lawrence lit a spark in an entire generation of comics. “Martin Lawrence inspired me be who I am,” says Tracy Morgan, who considers himself as much Lawrence’s protégé as his friend. “I was already funny, but me and my brother went to see Martin on ‘Def Jam’ and four months later I was on a stage with him performing. Literally,” Morgan adds. “Martin Lawrence is my OG. He let me eat at his table. He just said, ‘Don’t be greedy — share.’ Martin Lawrence taught me a lot.”

Stand-up — including performing to crowds of as many as 18,000 people in his hometown of Landover, Md. — prepared him for the early breakout opportunities that followed: a “Star Search” run and regular stints on “Def Jam” led to scene-stealing roles in films like “House Party” and “Do the Right Thing.” Chris Albrecht at HBO soon connected him with writer John Bowman and the two concocted his sitcom “Martin” at Lawrence’s house.

The show became a ratings juggernaut on Fox, bolstering the then still-nascent network against its more established rivals, and proved as pivotal to a new wave of Black-led TV comedies as “The Cosby Show” had been a decade earlier. “I was just doing me, and I was trying to come off as real as possible just by being natural,” he says. “We went for it every week to give them laughs and just keep it real.”

Viewers developed a special affection for Martin’s secondary role on the show, weave-wearing hairstylist Sheneneh Jenkins. “I don’t know if the demand surprised me because she’s so funny and she’s so real,” he says. “Sheneneh’s my sister, she’s my nieces, so I love playing her and I knew people would take to her and her attitudes and all that.” Sheneneh’s appeal inspired a love for prosthetics and wigs that would later lead him to conceive the scrappy, relatable title character in the blockbuster “Big Momma’s House” franchise. “She reminds you of everybody’s grandmother or mother, and has heart. She’s endearing, and she’s spunky.”

On film, Lawrence particularly relished sharing the screen in “Life” with Eddie Murphy, a hero he’d once driven two hours to see perform stand-up. “I just drove back home saying to myself, ‘I’ve got work to do,’” he laughs. “And then I wound up working with him. I know it could only be but God that sent that blessing my way.”

Screen partnerships, like with Murphy in “Life” and especially Will Smith in the “Bad Boys” films, proved crucial to his creative growth. “It’s fun to be the funny man,” he says, “but when it’s time to be the straight man, be the straight man. And with partners like Eddie Murphy and Will Smith that are great at what they do, it just makes for great chemistry.” He remembers thinking “Bad Boys” was a dream project “because it was able to be able to show a real side of me, other things that I could do — not just comedy but some drama, some whooping some ass!”

“It was a fun team, the three of us,” filmmaker Michael Bay recalls of making the first “Bad Boys” film, recalling the studio’s little faith in him as a first-time director, and not much more support for Lawrence and Smith as leading men. “I have really fond memories of that movie because they treated the three of us so bad. It’s literally the greatest training ground, when no one believes in what you’re doing and they say it’s not going to work.”

“Martin’s a comic genius,” Bay continues, recalling how he would “wind up” the comedian in between scenes to heighten Lawrence’s hysterical responses by instructing Smith to call Lawrence a “bitch” in a scene when it clearly rankled him. “Comedians, they never want to lose. They always have to come back with the best lines. And you can see him coming up with a joke live on camera that brings the house down. He goes, ‘I’ll drive off this fucking cliff. It will be two bitches in the sea.’”

Amid his meteoric successes, Lawrence would also stumble occasionally, generating distressing headlines that reported health crises and erratic behavior. “I got through it through faith, through family and close friends that loved and cared about me and that took me up under their wing and supported me… and told me this was right and this was wrong,” says Lawrence, who also credits his devoted audience for reigniting his creative drive. “I probably was depressed and lost energy for what I was doing, but I got that back. My fans helped me get that back.”

Following the worldwide box office haul of $424.6 million for “Bad Boys for Life” and a fourth film in the works, Lawrence is contemplating a full-circle return to the stand-up stage. “I believe God will let me know when that time is right, when He is ready for me to get back out there and speak my piece,” he says. “I just want it to be fun and insightful and people to laugh and take their minds away from crazy stuff.”

Lawrence says that’s a course he means to follow in all facets of his career going forward. “The challenges will be what they will, but I’m up for them,” he says. “This chapter of my life is just about putting out good work and doing good things and being a light and a vessel for people.” Currently, the only detour he’ll take from “Bad Boys 4” is to hit Hollywood Boulevard for that star — but it will be a short one.

“It’s about focus and being ready, and staying ready,” he says. “We’ll celebrate for a minute — but then it’s time to get back to work.”