Don Cheadle Talks About His FRESH PRINCE OF BEL-AIR Spin-Off Pilot That Didn't Get Picked Up

Academy Award-nominee Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda, Crash, Avengers: Endgame, The Wonder Years) has had a ton of different roles over the years, showing up in over 100 different movies and shows since the mid-eighties. We know him for his dramas, comedies and for being an Avenger, but one role that didn’t pan out as it was planned was that of the character Ice Tray from an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

The character was almost turned into his own series on NBC, and Cheadle talked about it on this week’s People’s Party with Talib Kweli (via Uproxx), where he shared:

“Ice Tray is like the rocket of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. It humanized Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in a lot of ways. They were starting to deal with Will Smith’s character and what that family would look like in a real situation.”

Cheadle’s character came from and eventually returned to Philadelphia, where Smith’s character had escaped from, thanks to his extended family. The episode was the fifth of the first season, and it set the tone for how the show would continue to grapple with race, privilege, and the Fresh Prince’s conflicted feelings about “getting out” of West Philadelphia.

It was also a funny cameo and a fan favorite, starring an actor with serious talent — three facts that the Fresh Prince‘s producers caught onto in a hurry.

“You come to a table read Monday, Tuesday rehearse, Wednesday rehearse, Thursday do it in front of a life audience. So by that Thursday, the producers said ‘we actually want to do a spinoff around your character. We shot a whole pilot. Didn’t get picked up.”

Kweli asked what the name of the series would have been, and Cheadle said:

“In The House,” Cheadle says with a laugh. “And they kept the name of it for the L.L. joint.”

So we never got a shot to see an Ice Tray/Hillary Banks crossover romance, but Cheadle seems to have done pretty well for himself in his career.