A young black guy listening to NWA's Straight Outta Compton in the ghetto in 1988 might be surprised at how one of his heroes has turned out.

After all, the seminal album is one that helped define modern music and gave voice to a generation previously sidelined, especially by mainstream popular culture. So imagine how that young man might feel when he sees former NWA-er Ice Cube in 2007 in a nice, safe comedy, trying to fix up a house and placate his nuclear family in Are We Done Yet?, a sequel to Are We There Yet?

It is shocking to see the once-angry revolutionary behind the legendary ditty F*** Tha Police now a happily married, business-savvy media mogul. Not only that, but he walks into the Los Angeles interview room wearing a shirt emblazoned not with the polemic messages of old, but the film's title, "just in case you forgot the movie", he jokes.

Even more amazingly, in reprising his role as hapless hubby Nick, he is actually taking over from Cary Grant, right, since the film was originally going to be a remake of the classic 1948 screwball comedy Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House.

Unfortunately, Cube "just hated the title. It was too long". And after the success of Are We There Yet?, in which the man formerly known as O'Shea Jackson escorted a couple of pesky kids across the country, it seemed like a natural progession to put the same characters into Mr Blandings' situation.

"It's eerie how easy is was to switch the script and make it a sequel," he says. So now we see the rapper trying to fix up a rural house, dealing with rodents and insects and even worse, a dodgy builder played by Scrubs' John C McGinley. But is the man who cut his movie teeth on tough, Oscar-nominated fodder like Boyz N The Hood content playing the fool?

"I think everybody can relate to Nick," he explains.

"Especially the guys who went from being cool bachelors to cool husbands to cool fathers. Somewhere in there you lose your cool and you just become Pops. I like to play the everyman.

"But I'm not just stuck in this path of family movies. I'm going to mix it up. Not just do popcorn kind of movies."

That's good to hear. Particularly for anyone who remembers his performance in Boyz, as well as his rhyming skills. Plans are afoot for an Are We... trilogy, although, "It really depends on the fanfare and the success (of this one)."

In the meantime, he's working on a buddy caper flick called First Sunday. He reveals: "It's about two guys who get fed up with how the neighbourhood church is treating their grandmother, and they decide to rob it."

Ice Cube making films about grannies and worrying about how people will react to his work? It's either a brave new world, or another teenage kid in South Central better start writing some really powerful lyrics.

But just because he has found fame, money and success, it's nice to be reminded that his past hasn't been lost in a fountain of Cristal Champagne and bling.

He says: "Right now, I have those things, but I still have cousins and family and friends that are struggling in South Central LA. And I got to still speak for them."

For his part, he is involved in several charities and produces his friends' hip hop records. Fans of the old Cube will be pleased to know that he is working on a new album, Raw Footage, which he promises will be "more politically charged than the last one". It is due out later this year.