Taking the high road was a no-brainer for Mr. T

NEED TO KNOW

• Mr. T reflects on overcoming jealousy from peers during his rise to fame in Hollywood and professional wrestling
• He credits his upbringing and faith for teaching him to respond to hate with love and positivity
• His Netflix documentary, Untold Mr. T: I Pity The Fool, explores his journey and premiered globally on Sept. 8

Mr. T believes in taking the high road.

The 74-year-old entertainer opens up about facing jealousy from others as he came up in the industry while chatting with PEOPLE for Netflix’s Untold Mr. T: I Pity The Fool. The Rocky III actor explains that after making his way out of the Chicago streets to Hollywood, he found himself on the receiving end of resentment.

“I’ve had to deal with a lot of jealousy. In the neighborhood, a lot of Black people didn’t like me and white people didn’t like me, because I wasn’t supposed to rise up,” he explains. “They said I was a flash in the pan, a one-hit wonder and all that.”

“But I worked hard to get to where I was. It wasn’t by accident. It was well planned,” he says. “And I knew it’d take care. I said, ‘I’m not going to fall from this because the enemy would love to see me fall.’ I knew that I worked hard and got what I did and because of that, certain people I’ve never done nothing to will hate me, because I am what they want to be.”

Mr. T was determined to use his platform to spread the message that others should also take the high road, using his 1984 educational video, “Be Somebody or Be Somebody’s Fool,” as an example.

“If you’re not going to be somebody, anybody could play you,” he shares. “They’re going to mess up your mind. They’re going to get you hooked on drugs. They’re going to have you joining gangs, doing stuff you shouldn’t do.”

Mr. T started out as a high-profile bodyguard before winning NBC’s America’s Toughest Bouncer competition in 1980. Sylvester Stallone saw him on the show, and later cast him in the Rocky franchise, jump-starting his career.

When he was cast in The A-Team, Mr. T says the jealousy was hard to ignore, but he stayed true to his upbringing.

“On The A-Team, what I put it like, I took the high road. Like my mother said. ‘If you’re hating me, I’m going to love you in return,’” he shares. “Like Dr. King said, ‘I’m going to weigh your hate down with my love.’ So while you hating me, I’m going to love you in return. Plus, like I tell people, that’s what haters do. Haters hate. Runners run. Actors act. Players play. A hater’s gotta hate, and I give them the room. But I don’t hate.”

As for the ‘80s television series, of which he was the breakout star, Mr. T continues, “I didn’t have to say or do anything bad about George Peppard or whoever else, because I’m telling kids to take the high road, so I’m going to take the high road.”

Peppard and Mr. T clashed on the set of the series, and the former took issue with the latter’s popularity, first privately and eventually publicly.

“I handled it without taking it to the street. I didn’t say, ‘Hey George, you got a beef with me? Let’s take it outside.’ I didn’t do that,” Mr. T says. “He had the problem. I didn’t have the problem. My Bible teaches me to love people.”

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“So he was out there, in there, howling, ‘Yeah, I hate Mr. T,’ And I wouldn’t fight it back. I wouldn’t give him the ammunition to work with. You ain’t heard me say nothing bad about that. That’s how I beat everybody.”

He also faced jealousy in the WWE, with some wrestlers suggesting he got a “shortcut,” though he did have a background in wrestling from his high school days. While he concedes it was different from the WWE, he says it played a part in making him “tough.”

“They didn’t know I was tough. They thought I was just a celebrity. So they hated, and I loved them,” he concludes.

Untold Mr. T: I Pity The Fool is out now on Netflix.

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