“The Players Club” is a classic Black film that tells the story of a struggling single mom who uses her beauty and body to make money at a strip club as a way to pay for college. The movie stars now household names like LisaRaye McCoy, Ice Cube, Jamie Foxx, and the late Bernie Mac.
McCoy’s character, Diamond, who is the single mom, has to deal with several problems, including Ronnie, her exotic dancing rival at the strip club.
The two have their bickering moments throughout the film until one argument precipitates a physical fight. A fight that Chrystale Wilson, who plays Ronnie, says went differently than initially rehearsed.
In a resurfaced 2021 clip from the “85 South Show,” Wilson recalls what really happened during the fight scene between her and McCoy’s characters. She said the entire fight was “choreographed” but there was a point when Diamond pushes Ronnie’s head into a mirror which was “not supposed to happen.”
Wilson explained, “She ended up pushing me into a mirror and I hit my head. That was not supposed to happen and so the blood came out my mouth but it wasn’t supposed to come out then. I was holding a pellet in my mouth and I was supposed to bust it at a certain time and when she did that I thought, ‘Oh b—ch.’”
She said looking back at the movie you can see she immediately got up and grabbed McCoy and pushed her to the floor when suddenly Ice Cube, who was not only a character in the film but also the director, interjected.
Cube immediately went to yelling “Cut cut hey hey hey That’s not how that sh-t supposed to go,” said Wilson in the clip.
She claims she apologized for her part in the fight with LisaRaye, stating “I was new, she was new. And so sh-t happens and it just went down a way. I was very reactive.”
In an Instagram Live that was reposted on a fan’s YouTube page in 2020, McCoy also admitted to there being some issues between her and Wilson.
Showing her followers which points in the fight scene were really her and Wilson and which few scenes were stunt doubles. McCoy said “actually we didn’t need no damn stunt doubles because at the particular time Chrystale and I wasn’t really getting along, so the fight scene was really authentic. I’ll say that for then.”
In her interview, Wilson also revealed that there was “animosity” and “tension” based on her actions during an earlier scene.
“It was tension built up because the other scene where I say ‘I run this motherf-cker’ and I put my finger in her face. That wasn’t like that, that wasn’t written in there at all.”
Wilson notes that as being one scene that improvised, she said she told Cube, “I don’t want her to rehearse with me, I don’t want us to go through this scene because I want her to be hella uncomfortable when I walk up on her.“
Wilson claims her goal was to make the scene more “believable.” She said, “Anything we rehearsed was too rehearsed and she was like, ‘Back up off me, girl,’” and apparently the tactic worked … maybe a little too well.
Chrystale Wilson (aka Ronnie from the Players Club) explains the iconic fight scene with Lisa Raye. pic.twitter.com/wS8W8Bjx1H
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According to Wilson’s 2020 interview with I LOVE OLD SCHOOL MUSIC, she and McCoy “totally got along” at first and she even thought they “would be great friends.”
That is until, she said, “we both got casted and got the part, things were a little different because of her being the star, it was just challenges. A lot of things happened that didn’t need to happen.”
Wilson explained that they “were at odds. And that was real,” in the earlier scene, where viewers can see that McCoy puts her finger back in Wilson’s face.
It’s not clear where Wilson and McCoy’s relationship stands today but Wilson ended her interview by saying McCoy was a “beautiful woman, she’s a hustler. She knows how to take a situation and really ride it and get every single opportunity out of it. And that is a quality that I admire.”
