Showrunner and producer Sascha Penn revealed the tips star Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson and series creator Courtney Kemp gave him while working on Power Book III: Raising Kanan in his new uInterview.

“50 was intimately involved as was Courtney Kemp,” Penn told uInterview Founder Erik Meers. “Courtney and 50 came to me originally and said listen we think there’s an origin story to tell about Kanan. You know he’s a character that people really gravitated toward in the original series. You know polarizing in some respects, but also you know people always love the bad guy, and the bad guy, you know, the villain always, always poses this fundamental question for everybody which is ‘How did he become that guy?’ And so that’s what this series sort of aims to answer.”

WATCH: MEKAI CURTIS’ uINTERVIEW HERE!

“And as it relates to the process, you know,” he continued. “Courtney and 50 came to me and said, ‘We think it should feel a little bit like Goodfellas.’ like, ‘We’d like to have grown Kanan, 50, you know, do voice over like Goodfellas, you know, where you hear Henry Hill, as played by Ray Liotta, talking sort of retrospectively about the stuff that’s happening.”

Penn said that the most challenging scenes to film were the family scenes. “When you do something like this and you hire actors to play a family you don’t know if they’re going to feel like a family, you know?” he said. “You put them together, it may feel like they don’t know each other at all, you know? And there’s nothing you can do — it’s a leap of faith that you take. And so when we had to shoot the family scenes in the first episode I was really, really nervous ’cause I knew all the actors were spectacular, I knew they were spectacular individually, but you don’t know if they’re gonna feel like a family.”

“And what I think what was the most sort of gratifying and challenging at the outset is that you know when we were in those scenes they really did feel like a family,” he said.

Power Book III: Raising Kanan is now streaming on Starz.