Mr. T built a career out of playing the toughest guy in the room. Now he's saying Netflix turned that persona into the whole story, and he's not having it.

"Untold Mr. T: I Pity the Fool" premiered Tuesday on the streamer, part of its ongoing sports-and-culture documentary strand. Mr. T, 74, cooperated with the production starting in April 2025. But he told The Guardian, in interviews given ahead of the release, that he wasn't handed a finished cut until roughly a month before it dropped. His reaction, in his own words: "That documentary pissed me off, because they didn't cover a lot of stuff. When I saw it I was like: 'what the heck?' It's garbage. You build me up, then you try to punk me out."

His complaint isn't about accuracy so much as omission. He says his longtime pastor sat for two days of interviews and made it into the final cut for all of thirty seconds. Mr. T has been public for years about his faith, the sermons he sits through, the reflections he posts online. None of that, he argues, made it past the editing room.

What he says got left out

The list, per his own account: his stretch in the U.S. Army's military police corps after enlisting in 1975, his charity runs with Make-A-Wish and Starlight kids, the Thanksgiving meals he's handed out on Skid Row, the prize money from "America's Toughest Bouncer" that he gave away twice instead of keeping. What the film does spend time on, he says, is his old agent Peter Young discussing the 1993 film "Freaked," where Mr. T played the Bearded Lady. The two had a falling-out, and Mr. T claims he specifically told director Scott Weintrob he wanted nothing to do with Young in the finished product.

He's blunt about what he thinks is going on. "That's what we call, in the Black community, a white man wanting to change the story and control the narrative. If you don't know me, you're gonna think I'm some monster," he told The Guardian. On the Bearded Lady footage sitting next to his tough-guy highlight reel, he called it "an agenda," one built to "undercut what I'm about."

Netflix hadn't responded to a request for comment from the LA Times as of this filing.

None of this touches the man's actual biography, which even by his critics' account is a lot to fit in ninety minutes. Born Laurence Tureaud in Chicago in 1952, he legally changed his name at 18, telling the Chicago Sun-Times last month that growing up watching older Black men get called "boy" made him want the first word out of anyone's mouth to be "Mister." He was expelled from Prairie View A&M in 1971 for protesting a fellow student's expulsion, did a stretch as an Army MP, then built his look — the chains, the Mandinka-inspired hair often mistaken for a mohawk, working Chicago doors as a bouncer. Sylvester Stallone spotted him on a 1980 NBC special and cast him as Clubber Lang in "Rocky III." "The A-Team" and a WWF run followed. He's also been living with T-cell lymphoma since a 1995 diagnosis, managing it with checkups every four months.

Whether Netflix responds to the criticism, or quietly lets the numbers do the talking, remains to be seen.