Marlon and Shawn Wayans were the day’s guests of The View on Thursday (June 4), supporting the release of their long-awaited sequel, Scary Movie 6, and Marlon revealed exactly how much he got paid for a character that became legendary on In Living Color.
Shawn Wayans, who is one of the youngest of the 10 now-adult kids in the family, said that he and Marlon used to do impressions for their elder siblings “all the time” when they came home.
“We used to do sketches and impersonations of people when they would come home from California, trying to make it in Hollywood, and they would come home to visit. And me and Marlon would be doing sketches and stuff. Most of the time, we bombed in front of them,” he said.
Marlon then added, “But sometimes our sketches, actually, they was like, ‘Oh, something funny in that one’… I remember Damon paid me five dollars because he wanted to [buy an impression]. There’s a guy in my neighborhood named Oswald Bates… and he was self-educated, so he would use a lot of big words, ‘Philanthropical, biological…’ And Damon was like, ‘Ooh, that’s funny. I’m going to give you five dollars for that, and he went on and made that a huge character in In Living Color.”
When the cohosts panned the amount, though, Wayans defended it by saying, “For five dollars, you know how much candy I got for that? That’s a million dollars for a five-year-old.”
When asked if they were interested in reviving In Living Color, Shawn deferred to his elder brothers, Keenen Ivory Wayans and Damon Wayans, but he added, “What we would love to do one day is an In Living Color special, get everybody back, and do like a half-hour or hour, really funny special.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Marlon also revealed that the decision to reunite the family for another round of Scary Movie, after 25 years away from the franchise (they did not produce Scary Movie 3, 4, or 5), was that their father encouraged them to do so on his deathbed.
“My dad was … in the hospital. He was like, not deathbed, but it’s like the week… He was dying, and he wanted me and my brothers to work together again. And we ain’t worked together in 20 years. You get older, you have differences of opinion, right? I’m like, ‘Pop, it’s hard to get four Black men on the same page. New Edition keeps breaking up, and we’ve got four Bobby Browns in our family,’” he remembered. “And my dad was just like, ‘Yeah, but I want you guys to work together again.’ I said, ‘All right, we’ll do it.’ He said, ‘For me.’ I said, ‘I promise.’ And I shook his hand, and I told him we’d do it. And I think my dad saw something. He said, ‘You guys have magic when you all work together.’ And my dad’s really close with God, so I think they needed that. We need each other, and we need to bring these laughters to the world.”
The View, weekdays, 11a/10c, ABC