Maybe you think you know Nick Cannon.
The 44-year-old actor, comedian, musician and entrepreneur has been a presence on our TV screens since he was a boisterous teenager on Nickelodeon’s All That in the late ’90s, and he’s been a tabloid headline fixture since not long after that.
But the Cannon who sits down with SUCCESS® for our entertainment issue is soft-spoken and gentle. His demeanor is easy; he’s quick to laugh. (OK, that part you probably could have guessed.) Maybe that’s because years of hard work in the entertainment industry have taught him when it’s OK to be quiet or maybe he doesn’t have as much to prove at this point, decades into the career he built out of thin air. Perhaps it’s because when we speak, he’s just put one of his sons down for a nap.
One thing is certain: Cannon is not slowing down. Today, at the helm of a media empire that includes multiple podcasts and television shows, he’s one of a small number of actors who have successfully navigated the transition from a traditional entertainment and media economy to find success in the digital space. He’s still an actor and entertainer—he’s been the host of The Masked Singer since 2019—but he’s also a superstar creator, with more than a million subscribers on YouTube and hundreds of thousands of followers across his other platforms watching and listening as he sits down with Suge Knight, TikTok-famous hip-hop duo Flyana Boss or Mike Tyson.
For Cannon, this current era is a sort of personal pinnacle, a media success story that’s at the intersection of his private life, his creative life and his entrepreneurial mindset. But while he sees the digital media space as the future of entertainment, in a funny way, it’s also a return to the entertainment ecosystem where he first hustled for success as a teenager.
“Really, what kind of got me on was I was a kid with a camcorder, a kid [who] would go do interviews and man-on-the-street stuff. That was kind of my style of comedy and my style of entertainment in the ‘90s,” Cannon tells SUCCESS®. “So, to see that kind of come full circle and it actually become a true business today with all the creators and influencers, it’s like—wow. I’ve been doing this all my life, and it’s kind of like second nature for me.”
Starting from scratch
In the entertainment business, it’s famously all about who you know.
Cannon did not grow up with the connections typically required for Hollywood superstardom. He was raised primarily by his paternal grandparents in a public housing development in southeast San Diego, California, where gang culture was prevalent and talent scouts were not. But the future star was motivated from a young age—and he was funny. He was 11 years old when he got his first gig, performing stand-up comedy on his dad’s cable-access program.
He was still a teen when he was added to the cast of the hit sketch show All That during its fifth season. The Nickelodeon series, which was like Saturday Night Live for kids, was a staple of the network’s programming for close to a decade, and Cannon, for all of the silly characters he played, took it extremely seriously. “I was a teenager at the time, coming from my neighborhood like, ‘I’d do anything to get up out of here. Give me a dress; I’ll put it on! I ain’t scared. Is there a check that comes with it? Let’s go!’” he recalled in a 2014 oral history of the show.
The young actor had the heart and spirit of a great entertainer, but he had the aptitude for hard work and the mindset of a great entrepreneur. His time on All That (and The Nick Cannon Show, although short-lived) led to starring roles in films Drumline—for which Cannon’s breakthrough performance was nominated for MTV Movie Awards, Teen Choice Awards and Black Reel Awards—and Love Don’t Cost a Thing. Then, there was Wild ‘N Out—part sketch comedy, part rap battle, part improvised game show and all from the mind of one Nick Cannon.
“When I started the show, I was a young kid looking to find a place to voice my perspective and opinion in a comedic way, and I had so many friends [who] didn’t even have the opportunity that I had,” he recalls. “So, I was like, ‘Oh, let me open this door. Let me create this stage so people can hear voices like Katt Williams, and Kevin Hart, and Pete Davidson, and Mikey Day and Matt Rife.’”
Cannon felt certain that he had a hit on his hands, but MTV executives heard “hip-hop improv comedy show” and weren’t so sure. “They didn’t get it. They didn’t understand it,” he says. “So, I literally invested in myself, took my own money, rented a comedy club, rented some cameras, got my friends together and shot the pilot episode of Wild ‘N Out.” It wasn’t the traditional way of doing things, but it worked. “And if I would have gone the traditional route, let them make a pilot, and them pay for it and develop an idea, I wouldn’t have been able to own Wild ‘N Out to this day,” Cannon says.
Keeping doors open
This has been his playbook since he was young—with his shows and with his music. Hearing “no” doesn’t make it a bad idea, Cannon reasons. It just means it might take a little more hard work to make it happen. His list of current creative endeavors is long and includes The Daily Cannon, a radio show on which he often highlights up-and-coming music and comedy talent; audio and video podcast Cannon’s Class, on which guests discuss far-ranging topics, from the prison system to homeschooling to hip-hop; and Nick Cannon’s Big Drive, a Tubi show that finds him hopping in the car and riding along with everyone from Snoop Dogg to Rita Ora.
And then there’s Counsel Culture, the Cannon-hosted mental health podcast and show that asks, “What if, instead of trying to cancel one another, we counseled one another?”
Cannon connects to Counsel Culture on a personal level: “Being someone who has been on the chopping block many times, I’ve always just known that, instead of trying to cancel one another, if we would counsel one another, I think there would be so much atonement,” he chuckles. “I really sit in that space as if I’m sitting on my therapist’s couch, being as candid and as vulnerable.”
But like all of his entertainment projects, it’s a win-win: Not only does Cannon have full creative control over the content, themes and topics of discussion, but he also gets to give other people a platform they might not otherwise have. Now that he’s in his 40s, the former teen sensation says one of the most rewarding things is giving other talented and hungry young people their first opportunities.
“We get to curate this young entertainment space,” he says. “One of my gifts is to be able to recognize other peoples’ gifts and to be that guy to say, ‘Hey, this person’s next. This person deserves an opportunity,’” he says.
“If I’m a gatekeeper, I’m the one guy holding the gate open,” he continues. “I’m keeping it open for everybody.”
A balancing act
If the idea of hosting multiple podcasts and TV shows while also running your own media company sounds like a lot of work, well, it is. And while Cannon is at a point in his career where he could coast, doing the occasional movie or TV show and otherwise quietly collecting royalty checks, that’s never been a mindset that feels comfortable for him.
“When I sit with my therapist, he calls me a machete juggler,” he laughs. “It kind of makes so much sense… all the things people say I can’t do, I’m like, ‘Well, watch me. Imma show you. Throw me one more machete.’”
Even fatherhood, he grins, is something he approaches in a “machete-juggler type of way.” With 12 kids—Monroe, Moroccan, Golden, Powerful, Zion, Zillion, Zen, Legendary, Onyx, Rise, Beautiful and Halo—he has plenty to keep him busy as a parent. He put his son down for a nap just before our call, and in a short while, he’ll go pick up one of his daughters from school.
But being a parent has given him a feeling of purpose even greater than the most exciting entertainment opportunities.
“Maybe 10 years ago, I was kind of like—I was looking for a new challenge. I was looking for something else to intrigue me and inspire me,” he says. “Now, I don’t have to look, because it’s right there in all my kids. Whatever their dreams and aspirations are, I’m just trying to feed into that and invest in them as much as I possibly can.”
And if you’re wondering how he possibly balances all of his entertainment projects with raising a dozen kids… Well, he says, it takes more than one calendar. “It’s time management; it’s energy management. Whatever I put my energy towards, I’ll find the time. I think it’s really where my passion lies,” he explains.
“Idealistic optimism”
Cannon says he’s more mature than he’s ever been—fatherhood helps with that. But, in many ways, he’s still the wide-eyed kid he was in the early 2000s, full of a youthful exuberance that spills out into his life and work. He explains that he has an “idealistic optimism” that things will happen for you if you work hard to figure it out, and that’s an ethos he hopes he’ll pass down to all of his kids.
“I don’t think that the entrepreneurial spirit has been more alive than it is right now,” Cannon says, his eyes glowing.
He means that broadly—the fact that any young person can record a funny video and upload it to Instagram or YouTube in moments has upended some of the old ways of doing things in Hollywood, and success is something you can reach out and grab for yourself now more than ever. You don’t even have to have a camcorder the way Cannon did, as a future star doing man-on-the-street-style interviews; just a smartphone will do.
But he could also be referring to himself, specifically. Not content to simply run a media company, the ever-enterprising Cannon’s NCredible brand is getting into a new space this year, with a renewed emphasis on health and wellness. The line of NCredible Foods products will include NCredible Energy, an all-natural, zero-sugar energy drink made with natural caffeine.
“I just really, probably in the last five years, dove into that world in such a real way…. That’s a space that people don’t know I’m involved in: I’m an herbalist for one of my other jobs,” he laughs.
It’s all in line with Cannon’s belief that anything can be accomplished with enough hard work and dedication, so long as you don’t let anyone sway you from your goals. He saw it firsthand with Wild ‘N Out, the scrappy upstart show no television executives understood at first. Now airing on VH1, the show wrapped its 21st season in 2024.
Cannon shakes his head, smiling. If you’d have told him back in the early 2000s that the little show he dreamt up so that his friends had a place to tell jokes and rap together would still be around 20-plus years later, he probably wouldn’t have believed you. But, as it turns out, he had a trailblazing vision in what you could accomplish by casting people who were viral sensations but had little or no television exposure.
Looking back on it now, “The trajectory wasn’t linear by any means,” he says, explaining how he got where he is today. “But I’m so grateful for it. I’m so grateful for every journey, for every lesson.”
This article appears in the May/June 2025 issue of SUCCESS magazine. Photo by Nick Onken.
