Source: Harry Langdon / Getty
Eve has lived a couple of lives at this point. From working as a dancer, to rapping, to acting, to becoming a talk show host, married to a billionaire, she’s seen more than a few things.
So as you can imagine, she has plenty of stories.
During a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, promoting BET’s five-part series Ruff Ryders Chronicles, Eve talked about running into fellow rapper Ma$e during her days as the self proclaimed “laziest stripper on the planet.”
“It was a slow night and this guy comes walking in, and one of the girls who I hung out with was like, ‘Yo that’s that new kid, he just got signed to Puff,'” she remembers. “I go over there and I’m kinda just like, ‘Yeah, what’s up, you want a dance?’… He just laughed, actually, and he was like, ‘What do you wanna do with your life?’ And I was like, ‘You don’t know me, don’t be asking about me!’ Long story short, he literally was like ‘You’re not supposed to be here. What is it that you wanna do?’ I told him I wanna be a rapper, and he was like, ‘Get dressed, let’s go ride around the city and listen to some beats.’
We literally just rolled around the city until the sun came up. He listened to me rap. I never saw him again from that night until I got signed to Ruff Ryders… and he would come up to the studio almost every day while I was doing my first album, and just was such a supportive person. He opened up a church in Atlanta years after, and I was always telling people he was supposed to do that, he knows some things, and that he sent me a message that I needed to hear at that time. It was incredible.”
Ma$e was far from the only man who was looking out for her best interests in the industry.
She told ET’s Kevin Frazier, that when she signed to Ruff Ryders after a brief stint with Dr. Dre, she was well taken care of by her label mates. “I was the most protected female on the planet at that time. I was Baby Sis, but not like, coddled. Baby Sis in a way that you were gonna protect, she hustles with us. That time in music history was just phenomenal… I don’t think there will ever be another movement that way, ever.”
“They protected me,” she says of the group. “They wanted me to not just be the cute, sexy girl, they wanted me to be amazing lyrically… I was very, very lucky.”
That luck eventually spread to other areas of her life as well. Eve who is quarantining in London with her husband, Maximillion Cooper, told ET that she would tell her younger self to prepare for the expansiveness of her life.
“There are days I wake up and I’m like, ‘I live in London!'” she admits. “I would tell [my younger self] don’t be scared of how big you want to dream. Don’t think that you can’t have this much… Trust your instincts, you actually have good instincts. That took me a lot of years to come back to.”
