Tre Hale Cast as Suge Knight in Universal's Snoop Dogg Biopic 'Snoop'
Tre Hale will play Suge Knight in Snoop, Universal Pictures' biopic of Snoop Dogg, rounding out a cast that now spans the key figures of Death Row Records' inner circle (The Hollywood Reporter).
Knight was the larger-than-life co-founder of Death Row Records, the label that launched Snoop Dogg's career in the early 1990s. He was sentenced to 28 years in prison for manslaughter after a fatal hit-and-run in 2015. Hale's casting puts him opposite Jonathan Daviss, the Outer Banks star who plays Snoop Dogg himself, in a film directed by Craig Brewer.
The ensemble covers the rap world that shaped Snoop's rise. Myles Bullock, a star of the series BMF (Complex), will portray Dr. Dre. Camron Jones takes on Tupac Shakur. Algee Smith plays Warren G, the Long Beach rapper and Snoop's half-brother. Lauren London has been cast as Snoop Dogg's mother.
Hale comes to the role from the Netflix crime series Nemesis and as a series regular on the Apple TV+ comedy Platonic, opposite Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne. For an actor whose credits lean toward television, playing one of popular music's most feared executives is a considerable leap.
Brian Grazer and Allan Mandelbaum of Imagine Entertainment are producing Snoop, alongside Snoop Dogg himself and Sara Ramaker, president of Death Row Pictures — the production company Snoop acquired when he bought the Death Row brand in 2022. The combination gives the artist direct creative involvement in his own life story.
Production is headed toward a mid-September start in and around Los Angeles, with Universal scheduling the film for theatrical release on 6 August 2027. That release date plants Snoop firmly in the summer corridor — the season studios reserve for their biggest titles, when audiences and box-office tracking peak.
Snoop Dogg has been on screen before. His making-of-an-album documentary Reincarnated premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2012 (The Hollywood Reporter). But a studio biopic is a different instrument entirely — a major-label theatrical release, a named director in Brewer (whose credits include Hustle & Flow and Dolemite Is My Name), and a cast tasked with embodying figures who are still alive, or barely gone.
For fans of the era, the casting announcements carry a particular weight. The Death Row story has been told across documentaries, dramatised series, and court filings for three decades. Seeing which actors land which roles offers a first glimpse of how Universal and Brewer intend to frame it.
