Sean 'Diddy' Combs Gets Serious About Being Funny

Sean "Diddy" Combs  has had a preposterously diverse resume over the twenty or so years he's been in the public eye. He's been a rapper, a hip hop mogul, fashion designer, philanthropist, marathon runner, magazine publisher, and even a reality TV star. This week, with the opening of "Get Him to the Greek," he'll add another job title to the list: comic actor.

Though "Greek" has a serious comedic pedigree -- it stars Jonah Hill and Russell Brand and was produced by Judd Apatow -- Diddy manages to stand out. His turn as crazed record exec Sergio Roma gives the flick the same off-kilter jolt that Tom Cruise's bizarro fat-suit sporting cameo did for "Tropic Thunder."

Combs got his first taste of acting in a decidedly unfunny role, however, as a condemned murderer in the Academy Award-nominated movie, "Monster's Ball." Though he might have been a bit stiff in the part, the experience made Combs want to get serious as an actor. Soon afterward, he began to work with Susan Batson -- acting coach of the stars -- to help him prepare for the unlikely lead in the Broadway revival of "Raisin in the Sun." And he was, by all accounts, not bad. As jaded New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley wrote, Combs' performance was "not the wholesale embarrassment that connoisseurs of schadenfreude were hoping for."

So when director Nicholas Stoller were writing a rock 'n roll comedy with a maniacal mogul character, they turned to Diddy. "He was just a natural fit," Stoller told me during a junket for the film. "Honestly, when I was writing the movie, I had him in mind for that part."

So Diddy approached this gig like all of his others. He prepared. He worked with his acting coach. And he created a whole backstory for his part. "Sergio was the first time I got to create a character from scratch," he told me. "He was the road manager for Pink Floyd. He was the assistant hairdresser for James Brown.... And this was at the age of 12."

Yet when he got to the set, Diddy realized that, to the delight of everyone involved, he took to Apatow's improv-heavy method of film acting like a duck to water. "One of the things that [the filmmakers] discovered is that I had a knack for improvisation..." said Combs to James Lipton during a recent episode of "Inside the Actor's Studio."

"Mostly everything you'll see me say in the film is coming off the top of my head."

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