OK! Exclusive: What Nicknames Did 50 Cent's Co-Stars Call Him On The Set of Their New Show Power?

If there has ever been an appropriately titled show, it’s the new Starz drama Power, which debuts this Saturday, June 7 at 9 p.m. ET. We sat down with executive producer 50 Cent, who also has a role in the show, as well as stars Omari Hardwick and Joseph Sikora and showrunner Courtney Kemp Agboh, who has previously worked on shows like The Good Wife, to find out how much music plays a role in this show, how men and women handle power differently and what name 50 went by on the set of the drama.

The show focuses on Ghost (Omari's character), a super rich guy that has it all, including a nightclub for only the fanciest and wealthiest people in New York. However, it's also a front for his humongous drug-dealing network. The drama flashes back and forth between the glitz and glamor of the club scene and the grit of the street.

So how exactly did this all come together to be one of the buzziest new shows of the summer?

While 50 wanted to develop a show that was “really gritty, something that had a different energy to it,” it wasn’t until he teamed up with Courtney, who was working on a separate idea for a show, that the creativity was really ignited. “When you're going to meet a superstar? You have no idea what to expect," Courtney explained. "It’s like, 'Oh I'm taking a meeting with 50 Cent today ha ha ha, let's have a laugh.' And then it was like, 'This is a friend that I didn't realize I was missing,' that just snapped into place.”

The two had a great working relationship from the start. “It was so cool because I would get a chance to talk about things that I've seen that would almost be laws of how things go," said 50 of the show's writing process. "Courtney would listen and listen and then she would go, ‘Oh say that again!’ You're with someone where you have the ability to communicate with them really easily and you don’t dread that they're calling at some point.”

So how big of a role does music play in this show? 

“Immediately I was thinking about how music would almost be like a play in the show, at points the music would say things that the scene was saying," 50 recalls. Courtney and 50 were able to work together even when they were working separately. Once she had the outline developed, he got to work on making the music. “I tried to create music that matched who the characters were. I didn’t know where the music would actually go, but I created 11 songs while she was still writing."

And that wasn’t the only adventurous drive around town this cast had...

When stars Omari and Joe were paired up in an audition, they also felt a connection right away. “I think the dynamic between Omari and I was really a huge deciding factor, we got along instantly at the audition and it's been a really great relationship,” Joe reveals.

Cut to one week before they started filming the show, where Joe and Omari are driving around in the middle of the night creating their characters’ backstories. Instead of doing their "research" for the show by sitting in fancy booths, indulging in bottle service and hitting the dance floor at Manhattan’s finest clubs, they took to the streets of Queens. “We did some street work," Joe reveals. Omari explains, “Both of us have done enough clubbing in our life. But we both like whiskey and Joe and I are old souls. 50's an old soul, Courtney's an old soul, so whenever you get an old soul, they know how to really drink. Proper drink. Not quantity of consumption, quality of consumption. So we had some moments of that, without the club aspect.”

So did they stop and talk to any of these potentially real life Ghost and Tommy’s? “With me in the car too, they would’ve been like, 'Who's this cop?”'Joe laughs. “That’s true! He was already getting into the character enough though that they probably wouldn’t have felt the cop thing because he was starting to really bleed into the guy, but we both have,” Omari confesses.

A few of the stops on their late-night tour? “We were looking at laundromats and saying, 'Oh that’s where we first washed our money,' we found my character's 'house',"  Joe remembers. And then they really got down to the details. “Joe actually pointed to a house and said, 'Oh you lost your virginity there.' He was creating," Omari explains. They kept those visuals for 7 months throughout the entire shoot, which included that horrendous east cost winter. “This winter had a big personality and you’ll see that on the show," Joe says. “There were times where we couldn’t get the lines out because it was so cold." "You just realize, my lips don’t work in this weather!” Omari exclaimed.

So what is the deal with Omari's character, Ghost, and how did this Power player come to be? Courtney reveals he is, “A combo platter of me, of Curtis and his early background, his ambition, and also my dad because my father grew up with nothing. He used to dance on the street for money, that’s what he and his sister did in order to have enough money to buy lunch. My dad never sold drugs, but the hustle's the hustle. And the American dream is the American dream.”

 Power struggle 

And what quality better illustrates the American dream than power? So with 50, one of the most powerful entertainers around and Courtney, a female showrunner, how do they perceive the way men and women handle power?

Courtney broke it down: "Women cannot be totally direct because what happens when a woman is totally direct too often, people stop listening to her. So what you have to do a lot of the time is be a better listener. Men who are listeners usually look soft, but women who are listeners can therefore nurture a person into doing what you need them to do. You have to think about what is this persons needs, what is their want and where does it align with my need and want? How can I convince them that in fact doing what they want to do anyway will just help me out." Spoken like a true woman who knows how to use her power!