Mike Tyson, like his predecessor Muhammed Ali, once was one of the biggest names in American boxing. He has been the source of endless fascination in popular culture, especially as cameras from all over the world were watching him from a young age. As a teenager, his life was heavily documented, as Tyson made his professional debut in the boxing world when he was only eighteen. He would rise to become known as the world heavyweight champion—albeit unofficially—and was the youngest boxer to even take home a heavyweight title. Regardless of his achievements, though, Tyson has become known as a controversial figure due to his decisions, which include biting off part of an opponent’s ear, and a rape conviction that led to a jail sentence.
It is this notoriety that brought public fascination into who he is as an individual, and Hulu, as a part of its 2022 lineup, released Mike, a limited series looking to untangle the threads of Tyson’s life. However, Mike is not an authorized biopic, and Tyson has been reported to not be happy about the limited series’ creation. At the beginning of August 2022, he posted on Instagram that he did not support the Hulu series and that they sold the rights to his life story without giving him a cut of the payment. But this is not the first time a production company has adapted his story into entertainment—HBO came out with Tyson in 1995, which took an extensive look at the community and people around him rather than Tyson himself. Regardless, Hulu moved forward with the limited series and the first couple of episodes have made their way onto the streaming platform. This will not be the only adaptation, as Jamie Foxx, too, will be taking on the role in the near future.
The trailer was released on June 9, 2022. Trevante Rhodes portrays Mike Tyson. Rhodes previously took on the role of Chiron in 2018’s Moonlight, which won him acclaim, and, more recently, The United States vs. Billie Holiday as Jimmy Fletcher. Opposite him is Russell Hornsby (The Affair, The Hate U Give), who plays promoter Don King. The supporting cast and guest stars include Harvey Keitel, Laura Harrier, Li Eubanks, Olunike Adeliyi, and B.J. Minor. Viewers will spot familiar names among the series’ executive producers as well: Claire Brown, Karen Gist, Craig Gillespie, Margot Robbie, and many others are on the stacked list of executive producers.
Mapping the Trajectory of Tyson’s Life and Struggles
Mike lays out its cards immediately in the first scene. It is Mike Tyson as the world knows him, in the ring during a fight. His opponent is Evander Holyfield, it is the second round at the MGM Grand in 1997, and then one of the most notorious moments of his career happens: he bites off a portion of Holyfield’s ear. The fourth wall is broken, and the footage rewinds through time to land in a singular moment: just Tyson along in a dressing room, throwing punches in front of an illuminated mirror. “We’ve got a show to do,” he declares in a voiceover. He has an entire theater audience clapping and eagerly waiting for him to take the stage. Even in his opening speech in front of the crowd, there is a lot to unpack already, and the audience, if they know anything about Tyson, has a lot to work with already.
Hulu’s adaptation thrusts the narrative back in time to figure out why he became who he was. As a kid growing up in Brownsville, which had the highest murder rate in the US when he was growing up, there were only two options for kids like him: fight or succumb. His mother takes him to a doctor, who declares him mentally incapable of everyday life, which worsened his situation. When his mother loses her entire savings to a man she was dating, the family was rendered homeless while Tyson, who was heavily bullied, barely shows up to school but gains a love for birds. One day, when a bully takes one of Tyson’s pigeons and beheads it in front of him, he finally snaps and chooses a life of violence. The scene has been set from this moment on, and Tyson becomes the figure we all know him as today episode-by-episode, slowly coming to understand from the director’s and writer’s perspectives why he is the way he is.
“This is all about immortality,” Tyson’s trainer says at the beginning of episode two, facing a young Mike Tyson eating a donut, “about your name being known until the end of time.” He continues his pep talk about them being crocodiles, that they need to wait for their moment and to bite the people that are holding them back. “If you listen,” he concludes, “you will one day reign like the gods.” Tyson breaks out into a smile, saying that this has been one of the only times that anyone has ever said anything nice about him. But what lurks underneath this conversation lies a thread of violence that ties it together, a carnal need to conquer and consume like animals. This framework provides critical context for what is to come in his life—but this series chooses to go a different, much more sympathetic approach towards Tyson’s biography.
An Immersive, But Lacking Experience
Some stylistic elements choose to liven up the content, taking it a step further than what it would have been originally. In the pigeon scene, fake blood squirts up into the air as a hip-hop track overlays the natural audio, overshadowing elementary school Tyson’s scream of rage as he goes for the bully. While an older Tyson, the one on stage, narrates the events of his life from a more mature perspective, reflecting on what happened to him and his mother, the Tyson on-camera, whether it be the teenage, adult, or child version of him, consistently breaks the fourth wall to add onto the narration. This particular decision, in addition to the voiceover, adds a specific thread that casts doubt on what the viewer is being told. Is it a hero’s story that he has created for him, to be performed in front of an audience like he is right now? Is the media right about what they are saying about him as he stands before a large group of people? Or are both parties potentially correct? Some things are not meant to be mutually exclusive. It is important to note Tyson had a one-man show under a similar premise on Broadway, which was directed by Spike Lee--that most likely is the inspiration here.
Each episode clocks in at about thirty-five minutes of run time, which seems like the perfect amount for this kind of topic. Any longer and the show would begin to drag and lose focus, and any shorter would have not given it space to flesh out the story and its characters. Audience members watching this kind of show are most likely already familiar with the logistics and timeline of Mike’s life—now it is time to make it come alive in a way that is different than what they are expecting. Does Mike succeed in that, though? Not really. There are certain checklists of life events when it comes to Mike Tyson and a biopic, and Mike does an excellent job of tediously covering its tracks in that department. Rhodes does a wonderful job as Tyson, truly embodying him down to the lisp, and so does the actor portraying him in childhood. That is one of the series’ highlights: the acting.
Mike is an examination of power. Tyson’s circumstances as a youth are portrayed in detail, whether it is a boyfriend punching out his mother’s brand new gold tooth or the bullying he experienced while in school. He stops going to school and turns to a life of fighting, and the sweet child he once was, caring for birds in his free time, is replaced with seeking out moments of violence. There are some shots reminiscent of Scorsese’s gangster films as the setting is wrenched back into the early nineties and eighties, making the entire limited series come across even more as an imitation of the content already known to the public. Tyson has spoken extensively about his life and struggles throughout. Since Mike is an unauthorized biopic, it seems unlikely to begin with that there is nothing new to discuss within Tyson’s story, and this proves to be true. At the same time, this is something we have seen before: a child with a messy background grows up into what society deems to be a monster. But is it justified through that story? There is only so much one can handle from this perspective.
The first two episodes of Mike are available to stream on Hulu as of August 25, 2022. The remaining episodes will be released weekly.