Jamal Woolard, who plays Notorious B.I.G. in the upcoming biopic Notorious, is known for his own rap career under the name Gravy, though it's been pointed out here and there that he is also known as "the guy who got shot in the ass near radio station Hot 97 in 2006 but went upstairs and gave an interview on the Funkmaster Flex show anyway." In a 2006 New Yorker piece, Ben McGrath described Woolard as "an enormous man—well over six feet, and more than three hundred pounds—with a caboose to match", and gave him a chance to explain what happened. He and his entourage were heading for the station for a scheduled on-air interview when, "after I got a sandwich and came out of the store—da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da!...The only thing I remember is falling, and knowing that I’m shot—just don’t know where. It’s not like, when you get shot, ‘Oh, I got shot here.’ Nah. You know you hit, so your mind frame is—you pumped, your adrenaline is going. I reach my hand over, and I see I’m bleeding. I didn’t see the hole. I can’t see behind my ass.” A lesser man would have been sufficiently overcome with curiosity to seek out a mirror, but Woolard went right upstairs and did the interview. He didn't mention that he'd been shot, and nobody appeared to guess; Joell Ortiz, who participated with him in an on-air freestyle session, recalled that he "seemed relaxed up there, and he killed it when called on to rhyme,” “Nobody knew what the situation was," Gravy explained to McGrath, "because I didn’t want it to be known. I was there to do my job, so I did my job. Now, to people it looks like ‘Well, you got shot. And you still went in there and did your job?’ Like, O.K., let’s put the shoe on the other foot. What was I supposed to tell a powerful influence like Flex, at Hot 97? ‘You know what, Flex? I’m sorry, man. I can’t do the show. I was standing downstairs—got shot in the ass.’" Unfortunately, when he finished up and came downstairs, he was met by a bunch of cops, who'd been summoned to the scene by people who'd heard the gunshots and couldn't figure out why, with all those shell casings on the sidewalk, there weren't any bodies anywhere. Woolard was taken to the hospital, where someone who'd labored long and hard to get a medical degree found that the bullet had passed cleanly through his flesh and was jostling around in his shoe.
The incident got poor Gravy banned from Hot 97, which has a strict policy of discouraging talent from shooting or getting shot in the vicinity of the station. Fortunately, as McGrath notes in a brief follow-up piece, this bump in the road to musical success gave him an excuse to take up acting, at a time when a role to which he might seem uniquely well-suited happened to be on the market.
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