Chris Rock could have had a lucrative career playing smartass cops. But did the world really need to see another black comedian with a gun?

Stretching his lanky legs out on the desk of his mid-Manhattan HBO office, Chris Rock thinks back a couple of years to the first time he saw Heaven Can Wait, the 1978 comedy (itself a remake of 1941’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan) starring Warren Beatty as a pro quarterback who dies too soon and returns to earth in the body of a tycoon. “The first thing that popped into my mind was, Man, Richard Pryor should have done this,” Rock recalls. “This movie would have been so much better with a black guy.” An idea struck him, one that would eventually lead to his cowriting and starring in Down to Earth: What if instead of a white football star, it was a struggling black comedian who wound up in the body of the old white millionaire? “If you’re doing a fish-out-of-water movie,” Rock explains, “you’ve got to go all the way. I mean, Warren Beatty in a rich guy’s house just doesn’t seem like much of a stretch.”

The 36-year-old actor–writer–producer–stand-up comic speaks from a lifetime of research on the fish-out-of-water experience: as a young kid from Brooklyn who was bussed to Andrew Dice Clay’s alma mater in mostly white Gerritsen Beach, New York, where he was “literally beat up every day”; as the underutilized “black guy” on Saturday Night Live from 1990 to 1993; and now, as a comedian notorious for pushing PC-sensitized buttons on race, sex, and politics at a time when many just want to hear Seinfeldian musings on shoe laces and airline food. “I’m a small guy, like, 134 pounds, and I was picked on as a kid,” says Rock, who for four years hosted his own late-night show on HBO, a skit from which has been spun off as the upcoming movie Pootie Tang. “When a little guy finally gets to beat somebody, boy, it’s hard to stop him. And that’s like me onstage.”

In his film career, Rock has also maintained an outsider’s pugilistic stance, spurning the industry-sanctioned course of broad blockbuster fare (with the notable exception of Lethal Weapon 4) in favor of such quirky independents as Dogma and Nurse Betty. With Down to Earth, however, Rock—who stars opposite Regina King—makes his first real play for acceptance as a mainstream leading man. The question is, can a comedian best known for his napalm wit tone it down for a romantic comedy with, as he puts it, “a lot of cutesy stuff”? More to the point, will this particular fish make nice with the other critters in the Hollywood pond?

“I’m not sure Hollywood will always know what to do with Chris,” predicts Down to Earth codirector Chris Weitz, who reteams with his brother Paul on the heels of their 1999 hit, American Pie. “The obvious thing for him would be to play a fast-talking cop—he could easily make a shitload of money that way. But he wants something more. He loves Woody Allen, and I think that’s the kind of eventual impression he wants to make.”

“What’s the point of another young black comedian with a gun?” asks Rock’s longtime collaborator, writer Nelson George. “Martin Lawrence does those movies, Eddie Murphy’s done them forever, Will Smith, Jamie Foxx. To put Chris in that box would be ridiculous. He’s a comedian with a point of view, and that point of view is not best expressed with him carrying a gat.”

Indeed, with a point of view like Rock’s, additional firepower would be somewhat redundant.