Issa Rae is not doing a remake of 'Set It Off,' the popular 1996 film starring Jada Pinkett Smith, Queen Latifah and Vivica A. Fox.
Issa Rae is not doing a remake of Set It Off, the popular 1996 film starring Jada Pinkett Smith, Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox and Kimberly Elise.
ET spoke with Rae as well as her The Photograph co-star, Lakeith Stanfield, on Tuesday about their romantic film. During the interview, Rae addressed reports in September that she was in early development on a reimagining of the crime thriller about four women robbing a bank.
"Oh, I would never remake a classic," Rae tells ET's Nischelle Turner. "I don't know where that came from."
Rae is, of course, currently focused on The Photograph, in which she plays Mae, the estranged daughter of a famous photographer. She ends up falling in love with Michael (Stanfield), the journalist assigned to cover her late mother. Rae and Stanfield both talked with ET about how they feel about first dates, though both are taken. News broke last March that 35-year-old Rae was engaged to her longtime boyfriend, Louis Diame, and 28-year-old Stanfield has been linked to Mindy Project star Xosha Roquemore since 2015. The two welcomed a child together in 2017.
"Uh, I don't know if I am good on first dates," Rae says. "I try to be just myself and I am always going into it like, 'Oh, they mess with me or they don't.' I feel the best dates are the ones that you don't know are dates, so I actually approach things like, I don't know if this is a date or not, and I am acting like it is not one, 'cause you are going out and meeting people all the time anyway, so I just treat it as a meeting and keep it pushing."
As for Stanfield, he joked that it's difficult for him to even distinguish what constitutes a date. However, he did talk about knowing when you want to spend forever with someone.
"Oh man, how do you describe it?" he muses. "You know, you just kind of know it. It's like, maybe more often than not, it's a ramp-up kind of feeling, it's like more things keep happening. More experiences take place and to finally just like ... And you got to go full throttle and it is scary, but you know, you hope what you know and your intuition is going to drive you forward."
Rae adds, "I also think it's just comfort. When you meet a person that you really connect with and you really feel like you want to be with forever, I don't know, a warm blanket just surrounds you. You feel safe. You feel, like, jittery and there's just a panicky comfort that I find."
The Photograph hits theaters nationwide on Feb. 14.
Meanwhile, ET spoke with Fox in November, who bluntly said she was against a Set It Off remake after starring in the original.
"It's a classic, leave it alone," she said at the time. "There's absolutely no reason to try to redo it. It's been done, and we did it so well, that people are absolutely going to compare it to that and I think that's her [Rae] taking on a tremendous chore because that film has become a cult classic and some things are just better left."
"Like, create your own franchise," she continued. "If you want to do a new film of girls robbing banks, create your own thing. You can make it up to date. We did that film in 1996. We are in 2019, going into 2020. So, create your own thing because people are absolutely going to compare it to it, and she'll probably, if it's not good, they're going to slay her for it."
ET was also actually on the Set It Off set with Latifah more than 20 years ago, which marked the star's first feature film.
"I don't ever think I'll have to choose between music and acting," Latifah said at the time. "I mean, I won't choose between music and acting. They're two different things that satisfy me in two different ways. They satisfy my creative soul."
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