1994 Tupac Interview Reissued as an Animated Film

In March 1994, Tupac Shakur sat down with writer Benjamin Svetkey for Entertainment Weekly. In early December 2013, the PBS web series “Blank on Blank,” which illustrates excerpts from journalists’ interviews, released this conversation as a nearly five-minute animated film.

A Tragic Hero with No Resting Place

The recording forms the foundation of the film. Rolling Stone summarizes the content: Tupac speaks about fame, death, and how he built his “machine,” about the press using him, and about his definition of a “thug.”

Two lines in particular became widely known: he saw himself as a “tragic hero in a Shakespeare play,” and he had “no resting place,” never able to close his eyes. When asked about the next ten years, he said, in the best case, in a cemetery-a line that seems eerie in retrospect.

More on his interviews: Interviews; on the motif of the tragic: Poetry, Shakespeare, Theater.