Can Athletes Ever Be Movie Stars?

Still Processing

News Commentary, Society & Culture, News, Arts

4.8 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2022

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

What happens when athletes decide to act? And what doesn’t happen? Wesley Morris and Bill Simmons, sportswriter and founder of The Ringer, break down the history of athletes in movies. They start with Jackie Robinson playing himself in 1950, discuss the Blaxpoitation-era stars and make their way to the ’90s, from “He Got Game” (where Ray Allen turns in a solid performance opposite Denzel Washington, directed by Spike Lee) to “Space Jam” (the less said, the better). They trace this phenomenon all the way to Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. The Rock, arguably the most successful athlete-turned-actor of all time — who seems to be playing the long game. Then, they imagine a new kind of renaissance for the sports movie.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Wesley Morris. I'm a culture writer at The New York Times and today on the show,
0:11.6	what happens when athletes decide they want to act? Actually, actually, what doesn't happen
0:18.4	when they decide they can act? This is still processing!
0:26.2	Bill Simmons, Wesley, you're the one person I would hop on a Zoom with at 8 in the morning
0:31.7	in my life and throw my contacts in and it's just always great to see. Oh, it's great
0:36.4	to see you. You're the author of Now Macandion Peace and the big book of basketball and
0:42.9	you're the holder of many opinions about the movies and sports. Therefore, you are uniquely
0:48.7	qualified to answer this question. What happens, Bill, when these great athletes decide they
0:54.4	can act in a movie? What goes wrong? Well, it's the safety that goes wrong if you're
1:01.3	going to ask actors to play in the NBA or the NFL. It's a little unrealistic. It's two
1:06.6	separate skill sets. Like, Karim and Airplane is probably our best case scenario for this,
1:11.9	where it's like, wow, that's Karim. I'm sorry, son, but you must have me confused
1:15.2	with someone else. Oh, he's not really playing Karim. I'm Nicole Pyle. Oh, this is fun anyway.
1:20.1	He's not just climbing to cruise at 42,000 who report again over Lincoln, over and out.
1:24.8	He's not in it too much. He can't really act, but it's okay. And that's where you want
1:28.8	to get, I think. Right. But that's not how this really started these with athletes acting
1:34.1	in movies. You can go back to the 1950s, 1955, I believe, is the Jackie Robinson story,
1:41.2	where Jackie Robinson basically plays himself. I can be the first Negro to ever play an
1:45.8	organized baseball mom. Not very well, I might add, but that's not really the point of that movie,
1:50.4	right? The point of the movie is to introduce Jackie Robinson, and, you know, near the peak of his
1:55.9	Jackie Robinsonness as this American, then everybody can feel comfortable with and love in some way.
2:02.9	Well, we also didn't have social media back then. Oh, this is a good point. Yes. So I either saw
	...

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