When the producers of "What's Love Got to Do With It" first offered Laurence Fishburne the role of Ike Turner - the soul-Svengali who partnered with a country girl named Anna Mae, who became Tina Turner - the actor declined.
The project looked like your standard TV-style biopic, and its portrait of a violently abusive, drug-stoked womanizer was strictly one-dimensional. This guy was the Freddy Krueger of rhythm and blues, and Fishburne had already done his "Nightmare on Elm Street." (He played a psycho-ward orderly in installment three, "Dream Warriors.")But Laurence Fishburne - tall, self-possessed, with credits that include four Francis Ford Coppola films and John Singleton's "Boyz N the Hood" - eventually took the job.
What changed his mind?
Well, first there was Angela Bassett, who played Malcolm X's wife in Spike Lee's biographical opus and who had been cast as the flamboyant, up-from-Nutbush, Tenn., Tina Turner. Fishburne had worked with the actress on "Boyz," in which he played the riveting Furious Styles, and in rehearsals for another, aborted film.
"Casting Angela let me know that there was integrity to the project," says Fishburne. "There was the possibility to do some really nice things."
The second reason he changed his mind was the assurance from producer Doug Chapin and director Brian Gibson that he could make changes in the part of Ike Turner as he deemed necessary.
"I was interested in bringing at least some sense of fun to him and some kind of charm," Fishburne explains. "Something about him to make him attractive to Tina in the very beginning so that he wasn't strictly a monster. So that there could be a transformation . . .
"Theirs was a very abusive relationship, but at the beginning of those kinds of relationships everything looks great to the `victim,' and I thought it was necessary for the audience to see Ike set his traps for Tina."
According to Kate Lanier, who adapted the best-selling autobiography "I, Tina" to the screen, Fishburne took what she had written and flew with it. "Larry did a lot of improvisation," she says. "Ike's character needed to be fleshed out, and that's all Larry - the ad-libbing, the nuances."
And according to reviews of "What's Love Got to Do With It," Fishburne succeeded in fleshing out Ike Turner. And then some.
His "brilliant, mercurial portrayal . . . is what elevates "What's Love Got to Do With It" beyond the realm of run-of-the-mill biography," noted the New York Times. "Fishburne puts exceptional spin on what could have been a one-dimensional ogre," offered USA Today. There are enough similarly laudatory blurbs to fill a new scrapbook.
The Ike Turner that Fishburne created is a complex figure - a man of talent, charm, business acumen and a darkly flawed psyche. Ike on the rampage is not a pretty sight.
For Fishburne, who has returned to the more serious "Laurence" after a few years as plain old "Larry" (he's also been credited on screen as Laurence Fishburne III and Larry Fishburne III), finding Ike wasn't a matter of delving into books, records or old TV clips. The actor, who had never before portrayed a real-life, contemporary figure, consciously avoided anything to suggest mimicry.
"I didn't really look at a whole lot," he says. "You know what I did? I tried to listen to what everybody was not saying.
"Nobody was saying, `Ike was really a nice guy, Ike was really a lot of fun to be around.' Everything that people said about Ike generally was negative, so I was listening to the things nobody would say. . . .
"I had the advantage in that not a lot is known about Ike. When you think of Ike and Tina Turner you're really thinking about Tina Turner, because she was out front. So I was able to just be inventive and imaginative."
Fishburne had only one brief encounter with the real Ike: The "What's Love" crew had been shooting in the house that Ike and Tina once shared in the Baldwin Hills area of Los Angeles, and word on the set was that Ike was in the neighborhood.