00:00I know you played football coming up. Your character Shaquille is like a five-star recruit
00:04at Hillman. Did you have to catch any passes or throw the pads on in the audition, or were they
00:09just worried about your acting chops? How much did the football play into that? First off, it felt
00:14amazing to put the pads back on, man. Hillman back on, be back in that field. As any athlete knows,
00:19you never really put it down. You stop doing it to the level you do it, but you always have
00:23that
00:23burning and that fire. But during the audition process, they just wanted to see the actors,
00:27and then after they looked me up and was like, oh, he played football for real. And so to come
00:31on
00:31and be able to portray a world that I lived in such a way, I felt so similar to Shaquille,
00:36just reading about him, be back on the field, and to even have a little bit of input, a lot
00:40of input
00:41on what I put on him and his swag, what he got on the field. It was a blessing to
00:45be able to take
00:46your first love and your found love through life and merge them together. I think it was beautiful.
00:51Backstage Pass, hosted by Gentry Thomas, downloaded wherever you get your podcasts.
