D'Angelo and Angie Stone's Son Cast as Biggie Smalls in Snoop Dogg Biopic
Universal Pictures has added four new cast members to its forthcoming Snoop Dogg biopic, simply titled Snoop — and the name drawing the most attention is a first-time actor with a deep musical pedigree.
Michael D'Angelo Archer Jr., who records as SwayvoTwain, will play Biggie Smalls, also known as The Notorious B.I.G. He is the son of two celebrated musicians: D'Angelo, the R&B singer and multi-instrumentalist behind Voodoo and Black Messiah, and the late Angie Stone, the neo-soul pioneer who died in March 2025. The casting was first reported by Variety journalist Angelique Jackson on 8 September 2026 (Variety).
Three other roles were announced alongside it. Rapper G Perico, a fixture of the Los Angeles underground, is set to portray Big Reecie Cup. Bentley Green, who first gained attention as a child rapper on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, has been cast as RBX — a rapper who appeared on early Death Row Records releases. Jonathan Daviss, known from the Netflix series Outer Banks, plays Snoop Doggy Dog, the stage name Snoop Dogg used at the start of his career (Pitchfork).
The four join a core cast already in place. Myles Bullock plays Dr. Dre, Camron Jones plays Tupac Shakur, Algee Smith plays Warren G, Tre Hale plays Suge Knight, and Laya DeLeon Hayes plays Shante Broadus, Snoop Dogg's wife. Craig Brewer, whose credits include Hustle & Flow and the screenplay for Dolemite Is My Name, is directing. The original script treatment was written by Joe Robert Cole, a screenwriter on Marvel's Black Panther. Snoop Dogg himself is producing alongside Sara Ramaker, president of Death Row Pictures.
Snoop is scheduled for release on 6 August 2027. It will be the first film released under Death Row Pictures' overall deal with NBCUniversal Entertainment and Studios — an arrangement that gives the label, which Snoop Dogg acquired in 2022, a pipeline into Universal's distribution infrastructure. Snoop Dogg first announced a biopic about his life in 2022, according to People (People).
What makes this casting stand out is the family lineage. SwayvoTwain's parents both moved in the same circles of late-1990s and early-2000s R&B and hip-hop that the film will depict. Angie Stone, who died in a car crash at 63, was a member of the pioneering hip-hop group The Sequence before her solo career; D'Angelo's work helped define the neo-soul movement that ran parallel to the era's West Coast rap boom. Whether SwayvoTwain has acted on screen before is not noted in the announcement, making his selection a choice that leans on lineage rather than a long résumé.
For a film covering the rise of Death Row Records and its key figures, Biggie Smalls is a complicated presence. The Notorious B.I.G. was a New York artist, signed to Bad Boy Records, whose friendship and subsequent rivalry with Tupac Shakur shaped the East Coast–West Coast tensions of the mid-1990s. How large a role the character plays in Snoop — which centres on a different artist from a different label — has not been detailed by Universal.
