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One of the most anticipated shows for 2016 is Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down, which makes its debut this summer via Netflix. The Hip-Hop drama gets a creative boost after the filmmaker revealed that veteran rapper Nas plays a vital role in the series and lends his songwriting skills to the project.

Luhrmann was at a panel discussion this weekend in New York for the Tribeca Film Festival where he dropped the bombshell that Nas is one of the producers for The Get Down, which focuses on the rise of Hip-Hop culture in the late 1970s. The Queens veteran is also lending his pen to the effort, and his lines will be used by a character in the series who goes on to become a major rap star in the 1990s.

As reported by Entertainment Weekly:

“One of the things, which I don’t think anyone knows because it’s not in the trailers, and we’ve been doing this for about a year now,” Luhrmann said, “is that one of the characters — I won’t spoiler alert it to you — goes on and we discover that he’s actually a successful rap star in the ‘90s. And he narrates it through rhyme, through rap. And this character, as it turns out, is played onstage in kinda sorta Madison Square Garden.”

He continued, “One of the great collaborations is that I’ve been working really closely in creating these rhymes, and he’s a producer on the film, with one of the most iconic voices of the ‘90s and that’s Nas. And so Nas has been this other huge creative force in the production. And it’s been playing really, really successfully.”

Luhrmann added that the creative team behind the show had doubts that Nas’ inclusion would work but it appears everyone is on board at the moment.

The Get Down series debuts in its entirety on August 12 on Netflix.

Photo: screen cap