Netflix has released the trailer for The Tupac Tapes with Angie Martinez, a four-part video podcast event premiering globally November 27. The series finally releases previously unheard portions of Martinez’s 1996 interview with Tupac Shakur, recorded in Los Angeles just months before his murder.
The original sit-down ran roughly an hour and 40 minutes, but only about 12 minutes ever aired publicly at the time. Recorded at the height of the East Coast–West Coast rivalry, the full conversation captured a raw, unfiltered 24-year-old Tupac grappling with betrayal, paranoia, and the fallout from his earlier shooting and imprisonment. “Everything you do, you have to suffer and pay the consequences,” Shakur says in one clip, while another captures him shouting, “Where’s the f—ing love? Just ’cause they didn’t kill me?!” Martinez explained her decision to hold the tape back at the time plainly: “I didn’t want anybody to die because of a conversation that I went to L.A. to go get.”
The interview came together after Tupac initially reached out asking Martinez to appear in his “I Ain’t Mad at Cha” music video. She declined given the tensions at the time, but their conversation led to an invitation to his Los Angeles home, where he’d arranged New York pizza for her arrival and wanted to clarify that his issues weren’t with the entire city. Once the tape started rolling, though, the conversation went places Martinez knew couldn’t be broadcast. She recalled returning to New York and “physically cutting the tape with a razor blade, trying to figure out what I could responsibly put on the air.”
Martinez told Netflix’s Tudum she held the full recording back for decades out of concern for people Tupac spoke harshly about, some of whom have since died, and a sense of responsibility not to let the interview become his unintended final statement. “After Pac died, it became even more complicated,” she said. “But almost 30 years have passed. I also realized these tapes were bigger than me.” She’s also firmly denied longstanding internet rumors that Sean “Diddy” Combs paid her to suppress the tape, calling the claim entirely false, and has said Jay-Z was instrumental in convincing her to properly digitize and secure the recordings after years of storing them in places as unceremonious as her laundry room.
The four-part format let Martinez tell two stories at once: Tupac’s, and her own, as a young radio personality suddenly holding information with real consequences attached. “I wanted it to feel like you were sitting with us, unpacking something that we’ve all been carrying for a long time,” she said. The series features a rotating panel of guests reacting to the tapes in real time, including Dream Hampton, Erica Ford, Joe Budden, Charlamagne Tha God, RZA, Lil’ Cease, Big Boy, Matt Barnes, E.D.I. Mean, Ed Lover, Monie Love, and Wallo, among others. At one point in the trailer, an astonished Joe Budden asks Martinez, “You’ve been sitting on this for 30 years?”
Martinez says she hopes the series complicates the public’s flattened image of Tupac. “We tend to remember Tupac as this fearless, confrontational figure, and he absolutely had that side,” she said. “But when you listen closely, you also hear someone who’s hurt, who’s frustrated, who feels betrayed… not as a saint, not as a villain, but as a brilliant, flawed, deeply human young man.” She was on air the day Tupac died and had to deliver the news to her own listeners, an experience she says still shapes how she thinks about the human cost behind the mythology. “Behind all the headlines, the records, the rivalries, and the mythology, there were real people,” she said. “And the consequences were real.”
The Tupac Tapes with Angie Martinez premieres globally on Netflix November 27.