How did this filmmaker from NC get ‘Freek a Leek’ rapper to star in her first project?

While back in her hometown of Charlotte to visit family for Christmas in 2019, Alex Ellis had a chance encounter with Petey Pablo, a North Carolina rap icon who had soundtracked many of her days as an undergrad at Elon University in the early 2000s.

He’d just finished opening a show at The Fillmore for Snoop Dogg, and “he just crushed it,” Ellis recalls. “I mean, it was beyond.”

Then as fate would have it, on her way to the restroom with her friend right before Snoop’s set, Ellis spotted Pablo moving through the crowd nearby. She suggested to her friend that they ask him for a selfie, her friend whipped out her phone, and Ellis excitedly waved down Pablo — who obliged by posing between them.

The whole interaction lasted about 10 seconds.

Neither Ellis nor Pablo ever could have predicted that just over a year-and-a-half after that very brief encounter they’d spend an entire week together in Los Angeles shooting an audacious narrative short film conceived by Ellis and inspired in part by one of Pablo’s most famous songs.

Or that Pablo would be talking to a reporter about their relationship and calling Ellis “my little bestie right now.”

Or that this fall, the two fast and unlikely friends would be appearing together at film festivals in their shared home state of North Carolina — first at the Charlotte Film Festival Sept. 27-Oct. 1, then at the Raleigh Film & Art Festival Oct. 6-8 — to promote the short: “Who Am I?,” which stars Pablo as a fictionalized version of himself and Ellis as the therapist he’s opening up to for the first time about his anxiety.

So how did this happen? It all started with Ellis taking a leap — in 2021, long after that concert selfie — by sending Pablo a private message on Instagram. “I have a HILARIOUS idea for a short film starring the two of us,” she wrote to him, out of the blue.

“If you’re open I’d love to share the idea.”

The life lessons that guided her

Although Ellis grew up in the Dilworth neighborhood and the town of Davidson, she didn’t exactly have the upbringing one might typically associate with white girls who grew up in Dilworth in the late ’80s or Davidson in the early ’90s.

For first through fourth grades, she was bused to Irwin Avenue Elementary, a school with a predominantly Black enrollment located near the center of Charlotte that she recalls as “this beautiful melting pot of diversity. ... I thank my parents every day for sending me to that school, because it wasn’t all just white people.”

By the time she hit her teens, her musical tastes reflected that diversity — Ellis gravitated toward hardcore rap made by artists like Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur and Wu-Tang Clan late in middle school, then added an appreciation for country as a student at North Mecklenburg High.

But her high school years were marred by tragedy.

When she was 16, Ellis’s father died after a relatively short battle with cancer, devastating her, her mother and her older sister, and leaving Alex in the grip of untreated anxiety, grief and depression for years.

She buried the trauma while studying musical theater at Elon. Buried it after being plucked from college in 2005 to star in her first professional role, on the Broadway tour of “Thoroughly Modern Millie” as the titular Millie Dillmount. Buried it while living in New York City and doing various regional theater productions. Buried it while traveling the country again at age 25 as part of cast of the national tour of “Legally Blonde: The Musical” in 2009.

It wasn’t until she was 27 years old and working on her first in-New York, on-Broadway musical — “Catch Me If You Can,” in 2011 — that she met with a therapist for the first time and finally started grieving her dad.

Two years later, she moved to L.A. to give a television career a try, then two years after that she took on a new therapist who took her management of her mental health to yet another level. “I just started to be able to really unload and take off a bunch of layers,” she recalls, “and really start to work (on thinking about how to) turn a lot of my sadness into art, and a lot of that grief into art.”

Around her mid-30s, after years of exploring these new depths, she figured out who she wanted to make that art with: a rapper.

All signs pointed to Petey Pablo

Pablo was born in Greenville, North Carolina, and broke through as a mainstream hip-hop artist literally as Ellis was getting ready to graduate from North Meck High. His breakout hit, “Raise Up,” was released at the end of May in 2001 and was, in its own way, a love letter to his home state.

This one’s for North Carolina, come on and raise up

Take your shirt off, twist it ‘round your hand

Spin it like a helicopter

Then 2-1/2 years later Pablo made an even bigger splash with his crunk anthem “Freek-a-Leek,” a love letter not to N.C. this time but to illicit drugs, sexual conquests that he put first names to, and sexual positions.

Sixteen years after that, Ellis was reminded of how wildly infectious that outrageous song can be at that Fillmore concert, which is where she randomly ran into Pablo, who she tagged in the selfie she posted — and who then started following her on Instagram. From that point on, they often would “like” each other’s posts; as a result, Pablo never completely drifted out of Ellis’s thoughts.

That’s why, when she found herself in 2021 revisiting the idea she’d had about wanting to make that art with a rapper, Pablo was the one who kept popping into her head.

But she also wanted to shine a light on therapy and mental health, as a nod to her own journey.

And while driving through Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills one day that spring, the idea for what would be her first stab at filmmaking came to her: Petey Pablo would play a heightened version of himself, attending his first-ever therapy session and explaining the relationship problems he went through with the women he shouted out in “Freek-a-Leek.” She also envisioned a musical-inspired scene in which the two of them would dance to a jazz interpretation of the song.

She had no clue whether Pablo would go for it, but in April 2021 she sent him the DM teasing her idea and asking for an opportunity to pitch it. His reply was quick and definitive.

“Let’s do it,” he wrote back.

She made her pitch. He made a joke.

As far as Pablo was concerned, their initial phone conversation was just a formality. He had a good feeling about her from the get-go.

“Alex ... she really looks like Darla from ‘The Little Rascals,’” the rapper says, chuckling. “She was so nice and she was so sweet, she wasn’t overly aggressive. I’m a spiritual person, so if the vibe is right, and it makes sense, (it’s an easy decision for me). Like, when she spoke to me about it, it was like I had already said yes to it before. It was like a second conversation, even though it was our first conversation.”

In addition to generally liking Ellis, he was flattered that she wanted to focus so tightly on “Freek-a-Leek” — although he was surprised by her vision, too.

“Out of all the songs she could have taken to work with,” he says, chuckling, “(she chose) one of the craziest songs that you could ever picked in life to make a reference to, as far as mental health is concerned.”

Still, he decided to mess with her a little. After she spent an hour outlining her idea, she asked him what he thought, and whether he was interested.

He paused. Then he said, “You know, I don’t really think this is for me.”

“The joy in her voice, I mean, it was like somebody stuck a pin in her balloon,” Pablo recalls, laughing. After a few awkward seconds, he broke and told her, “No, I’m just playin’,” before repeating a slightly longer version of the message he’d sent to her on Instagram: “Come on, let’s get it.”

In July of 2021, Ellis — who wrote the script and produced the project using $30,000 in savings — flew Pablo out from his home in the Raleigh area for the shoot in Los Angeles, where the two saw each other in person for the first time since that fateful Charlotte show.

Filming the 12-minute short took just two days, but they spent more time before getting in front of the cameras doing prep that included dance rehearsals every morning.

“I rented a studio just so we could figure out what we were doing,” Ellis says, “and it was like ‘Dancing With the Stars.’ He’d never been in a dance studio like that before, learning choreography like that, and there was a bit of a learning curve. ... So we did three days of dancing in the morning, and then in the afternoon we would do scene work, and then we’d go to dinner and be friends, and get to know each other.”

After their week of working and bonding, though, the project was in limbo for awhile.

‘This is what getting help looks like’

One of the main reasons was Ellis’s ongoing commitments to the jukebox musical “Titanique,” a parody (of the 1997 blockbuster movie) that featured her as Rose during an L.A. run in 2017; a limited engagement in New York City in 2018; and finally an off-Broadway revival in 2022.

In fact, it wasn’t till this year that she and her director, Christine Lakin, finally put the finishing touches on the “Who Am I?,” which made its debut last month at the Hip Hop Film Festival in Harlem.

That was a unique experience in its own right, by the way, because Ellis says she and Lakin were the only two white filmmakers in attendance.

But while she says she’s “always wanted to make art with somebody that I would normally not cross paths with,” she hopes her being white and him being Black doesn’t distract from the core theme. “I’m not a white savior,” she says. “I’m not trying to save. I’m just trying to be like, ‘Here. This is what getting help looks like ... and it can actually be fun. And it can actually be silly, and it can actually be really healing and endearing, and not so like Oh my God, I’m afraid to go in.’”

Pablo agrees. “It lightens the mood on that subject, ’cause that’s one of those subjects that people don’t really to talk about — especially people of color.”

As for their friendship, it’s continued.

“Oh, I mean, we check in every week,” Ellis reports. “‘Love you!’ ‘Love you, too!’ ‘Happy birthday.’ ... He had a gig in Vegas two weeks ago, I was like, ‘Smash it!’ You know, just each other’s cheerleaders.”

And it sounds like there’s a very good chance they’ll also work together again.

“I’ve pitched ideas to her,” Pablo says. “We have some great ideas that are floating around.”

One of their favorites? A documentary series on incarcerated artists, with Pablo — who served time in prison in the early 2010s on a gun-related charge — as the interviewer and Ellis taking a deeper dive as a filmmaker...

How to see “Who Am I?”

The only way to see the short in the immediate future is by attending the Charlotte Film Festival (Sept. 27-Oct. 1), or the Raleigh Film & Art Festival (Oct. 6-8). Dates and times are subject to change, but in Charlotte, the screening is currently scheduled for 2:15 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 1, while the Raleigh screening is set for 4:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 8.

For details and tickets: charlottefilmfestival.org/2023 and raleighfilmandartfestival.com.

Ellis says she hopes the film will eventually be distributed on a streaming service or network.