After a hilarious and memorable performance in the cult classic Friday, Chris Tucker, who played the role of Smokey, failed to make a return for the movie’s sequels. The comedian explained his decision to depart from the popular franchise during a recent interview.

“I never really told people this ’cause I kinda forgot about it … I didn’t want to represent everybody smoking weed,” he said. “I kind of made it more personal than a movie … I wanted to move on because when I did something, I never wanted to do it again. Back then, I was all about going to the next level. I had a good sense of like, ‘OK, now it’s time to go do an action movie.’”

As Tucker mentioned in prior interviews, he was only paid $10,000 to portray Smokey. However, he revealed that he was just eager to get an opportunity at the time.

“It’s one of those things — it was just a small movie,” he explained. “We filmed it in 20 days. I got about $10,000 for it or whatever, I didn’t care. I wanted the opportunity. It was that small of a movie, but that was the beauty of it.”

“It allowed me to get into character. It wasn’t no big distractions like big movie sets,” he continued. “You got light people and sound people and everybody wanna be a star. But that movie was just a camera and me and [Ice] Cube on the porch. Magic came out of it, thank God.”

After the release of Friday, Ice Cube went on to release Next Friday and Friday After Next, replacing Smokey with Craig’s cousin Day Day Jones, who was played by Mike Epps. Plans to put together another film, Last Friday, have been halted due to conflicts with Warner Bros.

See Chris Tucker’s explanation below.