Jonah Hill spent six years committed to becoming a hip-hop producer before his acting career took off.
The Moneyball star grew up dreaming of becoming a top MC - and hit the studio as Spindrome.
"This is an exclusive," he told U.S. radio show The Breakfast Club on Thursday. "I made a lot of beats... This is very embarrassing - it was Spindrome. Like syndrome, but spin. It was wack, dude. I'm not a good MC or a good producer - I mean I kind of made fire beats - but I still had an MPC (drum machine) and was making beats for six years."
The actor has now found a new passion after stepping behind the camera to make his directorial debut on Mid90s, a coming-of-age tale about an 11-year-old skateboarder growing up in 1990s Los Angeles.
"When I pulled up to the set on the first day of Mid90s, and the cameras were there, and the trucks were there, and the kids were in their costumes, and I was behind the camera, I thought, 'This is home'," he told New York magazine last month. "I knew this is what I wanted out of my life. And I didn't feel like it was given to me. I felt like I had worked for it."
Jonah reveals he used his love of hip-hop music as an "emotional backbone" for the film.
"Hip-hop, like skateboarding, is always misrepresented in film," he said. "It's always shown - people driving through the hood or popping champagne - as some exploitative dumb stereotype. And for me, it was it was very important to make an elegant, honest, emotional film, that showed hip-hop as what it is for me, which is the emotional backbone of my childhood."