Clark Griswold, Buddy the Elf and Ralphie better set a place at the holiday movie table for Ludacris because he’s coming down the chimney with a fresh Christmas tale, Dashing Through the Snow.
“Man, it was great making this movie,” Ludacris tells Us Weekly exclusively, “because, for me, there’s a lot of deeper themes going on.”
In the new Disney+ film, Ludacris, 46, plays Atlanta-based social worker Eddie Garrick, a man who lacks Christmas spirit due to a traumatic childhood experience. While taking his 9-year-old daughter Charlotte (Madison Skye Validum) with him to work, they meet a mysterious man named Nick in a red suit who, through a magical adventure, might help Eddie find his love for the holidays again. (Lil Rel Howery, who appeared in Get Out, Judas and the Black Messiah, and Good Burger 2, portrays Nick.)
“A lot of [Dashing Through the Snow] is about healing,” Ludacris tells Us, adding that the movie stresses the importance of “getting therapy and trying to understand and identify your post-traumatic stresses and things that you had as a kid.”
The film addresses the struggles of “trying to be the best self you can be in order to be the best for others,” but it still has the makings of a classic holiday story.
“But in terms of the Christmas joy and becoming a staple as a Christmas movie, I think it has all the elements, man,” he says. “The comedic element, the heartfelt elements, it definitely has the Christmas elements. You get to see Santa Claus in a different light, a real different light — a darker light at that.”
Ludacris tells Us that Dashing Through the Snow offers a “modernized” take on the St. Nick mythos, adding, “Santa has an iPad and an iPhone and keys. That’s a different take. It’s a whole different take.”
Ludacris isn’t afraid of doing something different. While his music career was blowing up in the early 2000s, he took on the role of Tej Parker in 2 Fast 2 Furious. Throughout the following decades, he would return to the Fast franchise and appear in movies like Crash, Hustle & Flow, New Year’s Eve and John Henry.
This artistic versatility mirrors the creativity of Ludacris’s Atlanta peers, Andre 3000 and Big Boi, a.k.a. hip-hop duo OutKast. Luda spoke with Us after Big Boi inducted Kate Bush into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and days before Andre released his experimental jazz-flute album, New Blue Sun.
“I think we’ve just become a lot more business savvy and trying to diversify our portfolios in terms of the art,” Ludacris explains, reflecting on how he and his other Atlanta-based artists have experimented beyond the single lane of hip-hop.
“Not many people are just rappers nowadays because it’s the business of music,” he remarks. “But with that being said, it’s expressing yourself in different ways and being open to that and just not having one channel. I think it’s been embraced and people are catching on, man.”
“We want to give the world our hearts and sometimes our hearts go in different directions,” he continues. “John Singleton’s the man responsible for taking a lot of people from the music world and putting them in movies. He asked me to try for 2 Fast 2 Furious, and the rest is history. I got the part. I was on tour with Eminem at the time, and then from there, man, that’s what birthed me getting interested and loving being a part of the film industry.”
That love will be seen both in Ludacris’ new State Farm campaign and in his new movie, Dashing Through the Snow, now streaming on Disney+.
