C.J. Wallace to Portray His Father in New Documentary Series

Time Studios' "Understanding Christopher Wallace" offers an intimate family perspective on Biggie's life

In 2024, Time Studios announced "Understanding Christopher Wallace" — a documentary series directed by Vikram Gandhi that places Christopher Wallace's son, C.J. Wallace, at its center, using C.J.'s journey to understand his father as the organizing narrative of a multi-part exploration of one of music's most mythologized figures.

C.J. Wallace — Christopher Jordan Wallace — was born in 2000, three years after his father's death. He has spent his adult life navigating the impossible geography between the Biggie of legend and the Christopher of home movies, family stories, and his mother Faith Evans's remembrances. "Understanding Christopher Wallace" is, in part, his attempt to close that distance.

"I want people to know who my father actually was — not who they imagined him to be." — C.J. Wallace

The documentary series differs from previous Biggie films in its focus on personal history over cultural mythology. Gandhi and his production team spent over a year with the Wallace family, filming C.J.'s conversations with his grandmother Voletta, his aunt, and with members of Biggie's original circle — people who knew Christopher as a person before he became The Notorious B.I.G.

C.J. Wallace told BET: "There are things about my father that the world has never seen. Not the rapper — my dad. The way he laughed. The things he cared about. I grew up hearing those stories, and I wanted to share them. Not to change the legend, but to add to it. To make him real."

The series also examines the circumstances of Christopher Wallace's death and its lasting effect on his children, who grew up defined by a loss they were too young to have consciously experienced. T'yanna Wallace, Biggie's daughter from an earlier relationship, also participates, providing an additional perspective on what it means to carry a father you never fully knew.

Voletta Wallace, now in her seventies, serves as an executive producer on the project. She has said that her primary motivation for participating was her conviction that her son's humanity — his warmth, his humor, his complexity — has been repeatedly overshadowed by the mythology that accumulated around his death. "He was a man," she has said. "A good man who made mistakes, like all men do. I want people to know that."

"Understanding Christopher Wallace" is expected to premiere in 2025. It represents the Wallace Estate's most ambitious attempt yet to shape the narrative of Christopher's life on their own terms — an act of reclamation that, given the decades of speculation and myth-making that have surrounded his murder, is both understandable and overdue.