Wesley Snipes finally bouncing back after jail time

When a Hollywood star takes a dramatic public fall, it’s all but impossible to get back up. As far as dramatic falls go, Wesley Snipes had a pretty spectacular one when he was sent to prison. Now he’s making a come-back.

When a Hollywood star takes a dramatic public fall, it’s all but impossible to get back up again. And as far as dramatic falls go, Wesley Snipes had a pretty spectacular one when he was sent to prison in 2010 for dodging millions in taxes.

But the White Men Can’t Jump star — who was briefly known as inmate No. 43355-018 — has slowly been pulling himself out of Tinseltown purgatory and is ready to enjoy the spotlight again.

Before things started to unravel for the 58-year-old, Snipes was one of the hottest action properties in town. His movies were regularly seeing box office takings in excess of $us50 million and his hugely popular Blade movies raked in a combined total of more than $US400 million.

Wesley Snipes, with Teyana Taylor, stars in Coming 2 America.

Insider spoke with Snipes during an animated Zoom call from his Los Angeles home.

He was warm and welcoming while also confident and cocky. He’s never really been the shy and retiring type. His house was undergoing some work at the time so he would regularly get up to poke his head out and check on the work.

Snipes said that his time out of the public eye had allowed him to take stock and focus on things that may have otherwise passed him by. In particular he came to the realisation that throughout his career, he hadn’t worked with enough black colleagues and he wanted to change that.

“I saw in terms of (my) filmography, that I had worked with a lot of great talent (but) there were a lot of people from the African American experience that I hadn’t worked with,” he says. “So I said, ‘OK well the only way you can do that is that you got to come into the genre that they’re working, be that drama or comedy, so let me go over here and do some of that.”

Snipes also realised his focus on action films — Passenger 57, Demolition Man, Drop Zone and Money Train to name a few — had come at a cost.

Snipes was jailed for three years, eventually serving two-and-a-half, for tax evasion. Picture:D Dipasupil/FilmMagic

“Action films are very solitary as I realised, you don’t get a chance to work with a lot of different actors in action films, or at least good dramatic actors, the character actors, so it becomes lonely in some ways and you can become lazy, develop a lot of bad habits,” he says.

After his release from a Pennsylvania prison in April 2013, Sylvester Stallone reached out and gave him a role in The Expendables 3 and Spike Lee cast him as Cyclops in Chi-raq.

But it was his turn in the Netflix biographical comedy Dolemite Is My Name, starring Eddie Murphy as Rudy Ray Moore, where it started to become obvious Snipes might just have a second wind.

The New Jack City star is back in action with Murphy in the long-awaited sequel to the 1988 classic Coming To America. Many of the original cast, including Arsenio Hall, are back, but Snipes’ character — General Izzi — is a new addition. He is the dictator of neighbouring Nextdooria and also the brother of the woman Murphy’s Prince Akeem left at the alter in the first movie.

Snipes says he came on to the project fairly late in the game, joking about how he

“After we finished Dolemite Is My Name I heard rumours that they were making Coming to America 2,” he says. “So I cleaned myself up, put on the prettiest dress I could, put on my lashes and lipstick and then I went and stood by the bar and waited for Craig Brewer, the director, to come walking past and once he came walking past. I said ‘Hi, hey, I’m Wesley’. You gotta do what you gotta do in Hollywood to get that job, man.”

He’s clearly joking, but it was almost as if there was an element of truth, maybe minus the dress and lipstick.

Coming 2 America is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video