By Christian Agadibe
Veteran actor, Pete Edochie has described fast rising comic, Femi Babs aka Zualakate as a brilliant young man with tremendous potential.
Speaking to Saturday Sun at a film location in Enugu recently, Edochie said Femi Babs reminded him of the late iconic actor, Sam Loco Efe.
Femi had paired the two veteran actors, Pete Edochie and Nkem Owoh in his new blockbuster movie, thus sparking a rush of nostalgia of the ’90s characters that inspired many young actors of today’s Nollywood.
According to Edochie, “I am working with Femi for the first time and I think he has a lot of tremendous potentials. He is a brilliant young man. No doubt about it. He knows want he wants and he is approaching production in a comic angle. I think this is going to help him a great deal, because most people who approached production from that angle were successful but they didn’t sustain their success. Femi shows a lot of promise. He doesn’t appear to me to be limited in any way. He speaks very good English and has a very clear vision. And to do a mini-production featuring Nkem Owoh and I, and then planting himself in between, I think he is very ambitious young man.
“One other thing about Femi is his ability to pick up something spontaneously. There was a friend of mine, Sam Loco, who was doing that very well. We were only three who had the capability to do that, myself, Sam Loco and Nkem Owoh. Whatever you threw at Nkem, he picked up and created something on the spur of the moment. It’s very few people who can do that.”
Femi, who was excited when Edochie extolled his acting prowess and emphasized how he reminded him of Sam Loco, said he decided to cast both Edochie and Owoh in his film after seeing Lionheart, a movie produced by Genevieve Nnaji.
“Right now, we are working on a new production. It’s could be qualified as a feature film. The inspiration behind this is the fact that every generation is designed to be an improvement on the former. So, be careful what you teach a child because he could do it better than you. I looked at the place of fatherhood in the world today and I realised that everything falls on leadership, and fatherhood is leadership. So, I’m trying to do a movie on fatherhood.” the Osun State-born comedian posited.