Tyrese Gibson has once again explained what caused him to cry in his 2017 viral video about his oldest daughter, Shayla.
It was nearly a decade ago that the actor and singer recorded himself having an emotional breakdown over a legal battle with his first wife, Norma Mitchell. Gibson would come to explain that the tears were a side effect of him being prescribed psychiatric medication, which he reiterated in a new interview with Angie Martinez.
During the chat, Martinez brought up Gibson’s “My Shayla” wail being a popular soundbite and meme. The phrase will also be the name of his daughter’s upcoming clothing line.
“I was on psych meds when I uploaded that video. It was on the internet for six months before the psych meds were completely out of my system,” Gibson recalled around the 1:08:00 mark in the video below,. “People had fun. They’d never seen me like that. I’d never seen me like that.”
“When I finally got in my regular headspace, I looked at the video and I was like, ‘Oh, shit. Wow,'” the Transformers star continued, adding that the moment turned into “something endearing” for viewers.
“So people don’t say, ‘What’s good my n***a?’ [They say], ‘My Shaya,'” he continued. “It’s the way girls are hugging each other. It’s the way people are greeting each other. Nobody in the world could have told me that something that was so vulnerable, fast forward flipping to something. … So now when my daughter goes places and I be like, ‘Yeah, this is my daughter Shayla.’ ‘Wait, wait, are you the Shayla?'”
“My Shayla” hasn’t been Gibson’s only emotional moment to circulate online. Last August, the entertainer posted a tearful video about his legal issues with his second wife, Samantha Lee, being lifted. A year before that, he grieved the passings of his mother and late actor Paul Walker, who co-starred in the Fast & Furious franchise with Gibson, on The Breakfast Club.