NBA: 30 NBA players you forgot acted in movies or TV shows

NBA: 30 NBA players you forgot acted in movies or TV shows – Ray Allen

In the late 1990s, filmmakers were looking for someone to star across from Denzel Washington in a movie about an imprisoned father and his basketball phenom of a son. Ray Allen, at the time a young rising star with the Milwaukee Bucks, was picked to play “Jesus Shuttlesworth.”

This was no token role; Allen was being asked to play a significant part, one of the film’s main characters with significant screen time. He had to hold his own in scenes with Denzel Washington, and be the centerpiece of scenes himself. He had to play basketball, yes, but he was also carrying emotional storylines as well.

Everyone at the time and since agrees: Ray Allen killed it in this movie. He was not a basketball player making a cameo, he was an actor legitimately playing a role in a serious movie with serious co-stars. He did an incredible job, perhaps the best dramatic role ever played by a basketball player.

Allen later picked up one more movie credit, as Adrian Grenier’s Harvard basketball teammate in the 2001 film Harvard Man. Since he has avoided the stage, although is’t not impossible he could circle back given his clear talent in the right role.