Cardi B has landed her first leading role in the upcoming Paramount comedy Assisted Living.
The Grammy-winning hip-hop star will play a small-time crook named Amber who goes undercover as an elderly woman to hide out from the cops and her former crew.
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The story, per Entertainment Weekly, follows Amber after a heist goes wrong and she can’t find a place to hide, so she disguises herself as an elderly woman to take up residence in her grandmother’s nursing home. The film is said to be in the vein of Whoopi Goldberg’s Sister Act and Mrs. Doubtfire starring the late Robin Williams.
Temple Hill and Stephen Love are producing for Paramount, from an original spec script penned by This Is Us writer Kay Oyegun.
Paramount won the rights to Assisted Living after a competitive bidding war in spring of 2019, according to the report. That same year, Cardi B made her big screen debut with a small role in Jennifer Lopez’s hit Hustlers.
“Cardi just came with a lot of authenticity and history,” said Hustlers director Lorene Scafaria at the time. “She’s an incredibly gifted and talented person who came from a lot, and I find what she’s made of herself to be an inspiration. I’m so grateful she was in this film [and that] Cardi read the script and felt it was authentic enough to be a part of!”
Scafaria also noted that the rapper’s past experience as a stripper helped raise authenticity bar for the film.
“I gave her a script and she delivered scripted lines, but if she wanted to make something her own, she could. There were moments I’d just have her yell at someone, there were moments where it’s a locker room scene of 15 women and they’re all playing characters and, Cardi [transforms into] one of them.”
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Most recently, Cardi B weighed in on the chaos that erupted in the U.S. Capitol last week, noting the difference between Black Americans and white Americans’ treatment by police, theGRIO previously reported.
“The irony is pretty funny,” she tweeted in reference to the angry, violent mob that stormed the Capitol building being referred to as “patriots” and “protesters” instead of “thugs,” “criminals” or “terrorists.”
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