Yesterday, after releasing his new album DAMN. and delivering a huge headlining set at Coachella, Kendrick Lamar dropped the stunning new video for “DNA.” The clip, directed by Nabil and the Little Homies, stars Don Cheadle as a police officer who interrogates Kendrick before rapping the song. Throughout the video, Kendrick is dressed in a Kung Fu Kenny costume—an homage to Cheadle’s character from the 2001 movie Rush Hour 2. Today, Cheadle spoke to Pitchfork over the phone about his appearance in the video, how he had two days to learn the lyrics, the ad-libbed dialogue from the video, his text conversations with Kendrick, the time he offered Kendrick an acting job, and how he only just figured out that he’s the inspiration behind Kung Fu Kenny.

Pitchfork: You obviously learned the trumpet for your portrayal of Miles Davis in last year's biopic Miles Ahead. How did you prepare to rap in a Kendrick video?

Don Cheadle: Well, it was a very different process. I didn’t have to figure out how to play anything like I did for Miles Ahead. As opposed to about eight years to try to figure out the movie and get ready for that, I had two days to get ready for the video. Kendrick just hit me out of the blue and just said, “Hey man, I’m going to do this video, do you wanna be in it?” And I said, “Yeah, sure.” And then he said, “Do you want to know what the part is?” He was like, “Yeah, you’re gonna come in and play a cop, and you’re interrogating me, and then you’re just gonna spit my rap.”

I was like, “Uh OK, you know you’re like the best rapper in the world, so what are you talking about.” He sent me the lyrics and was like, “You just have to get this much of it down,” which was like half of it [laughs]. I was like, “Are you gonna have a teleprompter?” And he said, “No, it’s gonna be fine.”

So I crammed like we have to do as actors. It’s tricky, because it’s not a linear process. His thought process is not linear. That was probably the trickiest part of it—to figure out how thoughts led to each other. As a human being, he’s pretty normal and straight ahead, but when you listen to his rhymes, he’s constructing ideas in ways that are not immediately understandable. It takes a deep dive to kind of figure out why one verse creates the other verse and what it comes out of and all of that. So it’s tricky to memorize because it’s so specific to the way he thinks. But then when we got in there, we really just started playing. We just started improvising, really.

It’s crazy that you only had two days. I wondered if you had this album weeks before everybody.