While we may still conceive of 50 Cent primarily as a rapper, the truth is that, since the release of his fifth album, Animal Ambition, in 2014, the man also known as Curtis Jackson has focused mainly on his career in television and movies.

Having gotten his acting career up and running in 2005, starring in the semi-autobiographical Get Rich or Die Tryin’, Fiddy has gone on to appear in hit films like Spy, Southpaw and Expend4bles, not to mention well-regarded TV shows like Power. He also has a bunch of production credits to his name, proving beyond reasonable doubt that the man knows a thing or two about the movie business. But, having said all that, what is his favourite film?

While a person’s tastes can change with time, we at least have a solid idea of what 50 Cent’s answer might be today. Back in 2007, an entertainment reporter named Cindy Pearlman wrote a book called You Gotta See This, which saw her interview a bunch of movie stars, writers and directors about their most cherished films. 50 Cent was one of the interviewees, and, far from talking about a gritty, violent crime-focused drama, as one might have expected, he focused on something quite a bit sillier.

“Oh baby,” the rapper responded, “I got so many movies I enjoy. I’m a man on the road. Just gimme a DVD player and a great movie and I’m happy. But if I had to pick my favourite one, I love Friday.”

For anyone who hasn’t seen it, Friday is a stoner buddy comedy written by DJ Pooh and Ice Cube, who also star in it alongside Chris Tucker. It follows a pair of unemployed friends in South Central Los Angeles who, after falling into debt with a drug dealer, end up getting into a bunch of scrapes over the course of a single day. It is, unlike other movies centered on inner city Black people at the time, a funny, light-hearted film that presents a different sort of take on the hood than was typically seen on film at the time.

“I could sit down and watch it right now,” 50 Cent is quoted as saying in Pearlman’s book. “I could watch it anytime. That movie makes me laugh.”

The movie was Ice Cube’s first foray into comedy, which was a prospect that terrified the film’s director, F Gary Gray. “It being a comedy scared the shit out of me,” he later revealed to Complex magazine. “[Ice Cube] was like the toughest man in America, and when you take someone you’re used to delivering on hard-hitting social issues in hardcore gangster rap, and who has a hardcore point of view on politics, you would never think comedy.”

But comedy was very much at the heart of what DJ Pooh and Ice Cube sought to depict. As Ice Cube himself remarked in that same Complex piece, “In the hood, they was doing movies like Boyz n the Hood, which I did, Menace II Society, South Central, and even Colors, going back that far. Everybody was looking at our neighborhood like it was hell on Earth, like the worst place you can grow up in America. And I’m like, why? I didn’t see it all that way. I mean, I knew it was crazy around where I grew up but we had fun in the hood.”

His and DJ Pooh’s effort was a huge success. The film was a critical and commercial hit, spawning a wider Friday franchise and drawing in some very notable fans—none more enthusiastic than 50 Cent.