After rapper Scott "Kid Cudi" Mescudi made his acting debut as the party-loving Domingo Brown in the first season of HBO's "How to Make It In America" last year, he wanted to come back even stronger. Although he says he did the best he could with the skills he had then, he wanted to really improve his acting chops. So he studied his performance in the six episodes he appeared in and hired some help.

"This season, my character has a lot more depth than the first season, and one of the things that I really took seriously was preparing. I got an acting coach; I wanted to step it up," Cudi told MTV News. "With anything that I'm doing, I always want to take it to the next level — whether it's music or acting."

"I wanted to be able to step on the camera with cats like Victor [Rasuk] and Bryan Greenberg, who are pros at this s--t, guys who have been doing it for years, and to be able to do a scene with those guys and maintain and really deliver with the focus," he says. "I really feel like I stepped it up a whole lot, and I'm excited to see it."

The second season is rumored to begin airing this summer, but a specific date has yet to be announced.

(Photo: Ian Travis Barnard/PictureGroup)