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Rashida Jones stars in the new Apple TV+ series, Sunny, premiering this week. To promote it, the actress and filmmaker sat down with The New Yorker for an interview, during which she touched on her teenage beef with 2Pac and her relationship with Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig.
Jones’ tiff with the late rapper began in 1993 when he disparaged her father, the music mogul Quincy Jones, during a chat with The Source. “All he does is stick his dick in white bitches and make fucked up kids,” Tupac Shakur told the magazine. Rashida responded with an open letter to Shakur: “Because I am the youngest of Quincy Jones’ six daughters, I cannot view this article or this man without bias [“War Stories” by Kim Green, Aug, ’93]. But I do think that anyone who reads this article would be shocked by his ignorance and lack of respect for his people.”
“To demean a man like Quincy Jones, a man who came from the ghetto of Chicago and through his talent and perseverance became a living music legend, demeans the whole progress of African Americans,” she continued. The letter ended with her saying, “Where the hell would you be if Black people like him hadn’t paved the way for you to even have the opportunity to express yourself? I don’t see you fighting for you race. In my Opinion, you’re destroying it and shitting all over your people.”
Shakur later dated her older sister Kidada. When The New Yorker asked how Rashida felt at the time and how those feelings evolved, she explained:
Furious! So precocious, so self-righteous. Yeah, I was so mad. It was a new perspective to me. I kind of understand the nuance more now that I’m older. It just felt like a completely unwarranted attack. My dad doesn’t work for the government. He’s a music producer. How he chooses to live his life and who he loves is just his own business, and I’ve always felt that way. I printed it off my word processor and put it in an envelope and sent it to The Source. I was interning at Warner Bros. Records that summer, so I think I wrote it there. Maybe I had the other intern proof it for me. And then my sister was out somewhere in New York, and Tupac came up to apologize to her, because he thought it was me. It resolved itself really nicely, because when I met him, he immediately apologized to me, immediately apologized to my dad. We sat down and had a really good conversation about it, and then he was family.
Elsewhere in the interview, she clarified that she’s not married to Koenig, but they live together with their son. “I’m sure we’ll get married at some point, but we basically are,” she said. She added, “He takes a very long time to make his albums, which is so lucky for me, because it means he’s home a lot of the time.”
Read the full interview here.