Current Events > Would Mr. T's career have been better or worse if he wasn't so comedic?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Clubber Lang was his one legit bad ass role. Everything after that involved a degree of self-parody. Most notably, his character in the A-Team was comically afraid of flying. Part of me is thinking he did that kinda stuff too often and it hurt his tough guy image. Part of me is thinking that, as a black man in the 1980s, he might have gotten further playing the comedic character than by being a straight action type.

The typecasting of black men in comedic roles was something 1970s action star Fred Williamson discussed in an interview. Eddie Murphy could do action-comedy roles, but a man like Jim Brown was relegated to playing a pimp on an episode of T.J. Hooker. Despite shirtless muscular heroes were all the rage in the 1980s, the only action movie of that nature to star a black protagonist was action Jackson. And that one amped up the comedy.


Had he kept a hard look on his face, would he have been Arnold Schwarzenegger's successor in Commando 2? Or would he have been a muscular henchman in a Chuck Norris movie?