CHRIS NEUMER: OK, now you’re going to have to explain what that means.
TERRY CREWS: I have written scripts, so I look at a part the way a writer would. That is, I look at it and look to see, ok what function do I play in this scene? You have to know what you bring to that scene and what you’re about there. And usually, I play the heat, the drama, the heavy.
CHRIS NEUMER: When you say that you’re the heat, do you mean, like a bully?
TERRY CREWS: No, no, no. I mean that I bring conflict. If everyone’s happy, then I’m the character where when I enter that means there’s trouble. In a movie, when I enter, it’s not a good thing. But I know where I’m at. But, you know, you don’t have to call me by my character’s name for months on end. Football taught me that, because you can go from being best friends to having to play that person on another team, you have to be able to turn that on and off. You need to find that middle ground.
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, and for a lot of people, there is no middle ground. You know, they’re either on or they’re off.
TERRY CREWS: Right.
CHRIS NEUMER: And then they make the news. You know, Alonzo Spellman, Ohio State? Mammoth of a guy, but one day he doesn’t take his meds or whatever, and all of the sudden he kind of goes nuts, you know.
TERRY CREWS: Yeah, running around outside barefoot in the winter time with cops chasing after him, remember that?
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah.
TERRY CREWS: Crazy, crazy.
CHRIS NEUMER: OK, I’m just going to figure most of them are Packers!
TERRY CREWS: Oh, okay! [laughs]
CHRIS NEUMER: Now there are a lot of football films out there, and I myself am a big fan of The Program, but I don’t know how true to life that is. I mean, you don’t see a lot of guys laying down in the road out there, you know. I also think of Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday, although I’m sure that’s just… well, that’s just Oliver Stone. But are there any football movies out there where you’re like, "Oh, that’s got it!"
TERRY CREWS: Oh, yeah.
CHRIS NEUMER: Or, oh my god, they’re smoking so much crack! There’s one, Necessary Roughness. Worst football movie ever!
TERRY CREWS: Yeah, Sinbad.
CHRIS NEUMER: Scott Bakula was in that.
TERRY CREWS: That was pretty bad. I have to say, Any Given Sunday was good, but it was too ambitious, it just took everything on at once. You can’t do everything in three hours. It went on through ownership issues, quarterback issues, the running back issues, LT issues, and all that, even the coach issues. It was too much. Whereas, Playmakers says, Yeah, you got all those problems, but my god, you’re playing football, you’re doing the best thing in the world. You know? But the thing is, you’re playing football, you’re having fun, you’re getting paid to play a game. Well, with all the bad things about Hollywood all the drug use, all that, it’s [still] a pretty good life…
CHRIS NEUMER: I’m sorry, Hollywood, did you say?
TERRY CREWS: Yeah, Hollywood. Well, and about playing sports, it’s a good life, you know? You make a lot of money. You’re having fun, you’re in shape. [People are like], "Oh the pressure!" Well, you know, there’s pressure everywhere. If you’re president of General Motors there’s pressure, or working at any company. You know what I’m saying? Trying to put out a magazine, there’s pressure.
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh, yeah, you know it! Well, it’s only quarterly.
TERRY CREWS: But whatever, there’s drama in everything. That’s why I love movies. Like Welcome to the Dollhouse, I’m a 350-pound black man, and I could understand what it was like to be a little white girl.
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, that’s a pull quote right there.
TERRY CREWS: [Laughs] Oh yeah, that’s the one! I love that movie by the way. It was great.
CHRIS NEUMER: It was. I was just talking to someone about this today, actually. It shows how dark my sense of humor is because do you remember the scene, the girl goes into the bathroom and says, I’m just here to wash my hands. And the other girl says, "No you’re not! You came in to take a dump, and you’re not leaving until I see it!
TERRY CREWS: Oh, man!
CHRIS NEUMER: The theater’s packed and I’m the only one in there laughing and my girlfriend’s like, "Shut up, shut up!"
TERRY CREWS: [Laughing hard]
CHRIS NEUMER: I’m like, it’s funny, it’s funny!
TERRY CREWS: They’re all laughing in horror and you’re like…
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah.
TERRY CREWS: Well, I went to see 21 Grams.
CHRIS NEUMER: Did you like that movie by the way?
TERRY CREWS: Well, first of all, I liked the performances.
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah.
TERRY CREWS: But it was way too heavy. Way too heavy. I mean, come on. Somebody has to lighten up a little bit. My point is the bleakness is insane. You have to have some bit of levity.
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah.
TERRY CREWS: I mean even in Dawn of the Dead, they’re shooting the guys who look like Jay Leno. But at least there’s humor in the middle of all the horror. But that movie, I went to go see it with Derek Luke, you know him, from Antwone Fisher? He’s one of my best friends. We went to see it together. We laughed when Benicio del Toro tried to kill himself — he puts the rope around himself and tries to kill himself and the pipe broke.
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh this is in 21 Grams?
TERRY CREWS: Yeah in 21 Grams. Did you see it?
CHRIS NEUMER: I did but I might have fallen asleep, or something, in it.
TERRY CREWS: Yeah. It was real slow. He tried to kill himself and the pipe burst, in the jail, and hot water sprays everywhere. We started laughing, and we couldn’t stop. We were the only ones laughing. [Derek] was laughing like, "Oh, oh!" There was a fat guy saying, "What are you doing?" I couldn’t stop laughing. I don’t know if it was a nervous reaction or whatever it was.
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, it just shows that you weren’t in the moment.
TERRY CREWS: You have to do that because I mean there is humor in every little thing. It’s a way of dealing with things, you know what I mean?
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah. I’m assuming with your background in professional sports, I mean, professional sports of every kind really never go out of style when you’re making movies about them.
TERRY CREWS: Yes.
CHRIS NEUMER: Pretty much as far back as the ‘seventies, every one or two years someone makes a movie about a professional sport, a fairly big release. You know whether it’s The Last Boy Scout.
TERRY CREWS: [Laughs a little] Oh yeah.
CHRIS NEUMER: Or some of these others. Do you think your background — I mean you have directed — when you’re talking to me here… Well, I’ve interviewed a lot of actors. And actors, I don’t want to say, as a whole, they speak differently than you. But you have… well, actors are more "me," it’s about me, me, me, how can I promote myself, how can I take this scene? You seem to be talking like, "What can I bring to the project?" which is the antithesis of what actors normally do. Do you ever think, with your background and your history, that you might be able to make a football film or aspire to make a film set in football that would just knock the rest of them out of the water? Because, is there a definitive football film yet?
TERRY CREWS: There isn’t and one thing is, I did actually write a football film, but it was based more in the semi-pro world because I didn’t want to focus so much on that whole NFL world, I wanted to focus more on a story with people’s lives. But it was more fun. I mean it was called Halftime, because a coach has to put his life back together after a player actually goes postal in the front office and literally tries to kill everybody in the front office.
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh, the Latrell Sprewell story.
TERRY CREWS: Yeah, well, you know, that’s just one of those things. Because you know these guys are just so… I think it’s just a matter of time before something like that happens. At least the NFL is giving these guys something now. I mean it used to be that they would cut guys without giving them anything — you got no money, you got nothing.
CHRIS NEUMER: Even if they got injured.
TERRY CREWS: Oh, especially if they got injured. They literally used to have guys sitting out in the parking lots with guns, and they’d say, "OK, make sure this guy doesn’t come back here."
CHRIS NEUMER: Really?
TERRY CREWS: Oh yeah! That used to happen all the time. I had a gun pulled on me, when I was with the Packers.
CHRIS NEUMER: So you got cut and…
TERRY CREWS: Oh I didn’t get cut. This guy John Stevens, a running back from New England, who went over to the Packers as a free agent, and he was an alcoholic. He’d [fill soda bottles], and he’d pull up to you in his car and say hop in, there were cans everywhere. In two-a-days, and he pulled a gun on me. And you know we weren’t supposed to have guns on campus. And then he’d be like, Oh, I’m just playing with you, just playing with you.
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh, two-a-days.
TERRY CREWS: Yeah, in July.
CHRIS NEUMER: Pre-season, that’s the word I was trying to think of.
TERRY CREWS: Training camp.
CHRIS NEUMER: Did you ever play with Travis Jervey? He was a white running back, first of all, but the reason I remember him is that he and LaShon Johnson from Illinois decided to buy a tiger together. The coach, might have been Holmgren back then, I think it was ’97 -- that’s why I was saying I thought you might know him — and Holmgren was like, "What in the world is going through your head? Did you order a tiger together?"
TERRY CREWS: Ordered a tiger?!
CHRIS NEUMER: Yes.
TERRY CREWS: That’s insane. I mean, these guys are nuts. But see my thing is, what you said about acting, I always go in and I say — and this is what works for me -- how can I make this [other] guy look good, or like the star, how can I improve him? And a lot of times that means, ok, be the bad guy, be the guy who’s forcing him to make choices. Force him to make a move. Force him to do something. Or even, if he shuts down, make him shut down all the way. You know what I mean? I mean, really force the action. And it’s dynamic on the screen, but the service is, how can I make him look better? Because how does it serve the movie? A lot of actors goof off and go, how can I look good?
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, yes.
TERRY CREWS: And then you watch the movie and you see two people trying to look good, and it’s horrible.
CHRIS NEUMER: Yes.
TERRY CREWS: And nobody wants to take the low road or the high road, so I immediately go down and I say, look, it’s about you. Let’s make it about you. But then what happens is it always turns around, that’s why I keep getting hired, because people are like, you made him look great! You know, but it comes off on me, though, like, "You’re good!"
CHRIS NEUMER: To use a sports analogy, You’re the Ben Wallace of the acting world.
TERRY CREWS: Yes.
