TERRY CREWS: I just got back from working out. I’ve got to eat something.
CHRIS NEUMER: I just look at you and it makes me feel bad.
TERRY CREWS: [Laughs]
CHRIS NEUMER: I mean what do you bench?
TERRY CREWS: About 475 lbs.
CHRIS NEUMER: You haven’t played football since 1997!
TERRY CREWS: ’97.
CHRIS NEUMER: And you’re still in that good of shape?
TERRY CREWS: Here’s the thing. I haven’t done a single rep in a long time and it’s not a strong man type thing. I just work out for reps — work out to stay in shape. I’ve got a sweet tooth, dude.
CHRIS NEUMER: I’ll tell you something, I was in Liza’s office last week and I was looking at your headshot and bio and three things caught my eye. One was that you were from Western [Michigan University]. The other was that you played for the Packers. We can’t have that in Chicago!
TERRY CREWS: [Laughs]
CHRIS NEUMER: And the third thing is that you’re best known for your part in Friday After Next as the guy who was gay. And I thought that was an interesting contradiction. Here’s a former pro football player and the work he’s best known for is this role. Contradictions make the best stories. Oh by the way here you are [ in Stumped?]
TERRY CREWS: I love this. Oh, that is hot!
CHRIS NEUMER: It beats having a real job.
TERRY CREWS: Yeah it does. Well, that’s how I feel about what I do too. It’s not work, you know.
CHRIS NEUMER: You know I was in the office of Rogers and Cowan, another PR firm, and actually Warren Cowan, who you’re with, that’s where he used to be. They represent Terry Bradshaw. And Terry Bradshaw said he hates pro football now because the quarterbacks don’t call their own plays anymore, they have a chip in their helmets that tell them what plays to make. I was like, "Are you kidding me?" Terry Bradshaw, who has a coronary every Sunday. She said, ‘It’s just an act.’ I couldn’t believe it. And the second thing was she handed me a script that Simeon Rice had written, he’s actually a big film buff. I thought that was interesting because the stereotype is that you don’t have to look like you — you don’t have to be able to bench press a car — to be able to act. It’s so interesting. I mean, how did you first get into it, into acting?
TERRY CREWS: Well, it’s actually - to be honest - I was always more of a film guy than an athlete guy. I had an art scholarship at Western. But I actually had a Chrysler scholarship to Interlochen up in Traverse City, Michigan. Then had an art scholarship to Western and I just walked onto the football team. But I’m actually a sci-fi special effects guy.
CHRIS NEUMER: What kind of special effects, what movies do you look at and think, "Oh I would have wanted to do that!"
TERRY CREWS: Dawn of the Dead.
CHRIS NEUMER: The new one?
TERRY CREWS: The new one and the old one. You know. I had a real passion for film and I really thought I was going to be a special effects guy. I also loved The Thing.
CHRIS NEUMER: John Carpenter?
TERRY CREWS: John Carpenter. Yeah. The Thing changed my life. It was the first R-rated movie I was ever allowed to see and it just blew my mind, after that there was no going back for me. I was like, ‘Whoa! This is it.’ When I was in college was when Spike Lee started coming out with his films like She’s Gotta Have It, in late 1986. And then Robert Townsend in Hollywood Shuffle. It was just the independent black film thing was really happening. I just started opening up. I was watching more independent film and less sci-fi.
CHRIS NEUMER: I went to school in Kalamazoo. In Western Michigan, that’s tough to do.
TERRY CREWS: Yeah. It’s hard to find. But you know my friends from the football team would get them and watch them with me. Guys would come up from Detroit and stuff. You know, a football team is like a society, straight up. There are rapists, but there are creatures and there are film guys.
CHRIS NEUMER: You know better than me but aren’t there just a few more rapists on football teams?
TERRY CREWS: When the game is over and we’re out of the locker room and they get out of uniform. I knew a guy who hated playing and he just did it so he could finish his house.
CHRIS NEUMER: What amazes me is that in football there are so many guys who just play for the money. I guess that’s true in all sports, but in a sport as violent as football, that’s scary.
TERRY CREWS: Yeah, you know, don’t get me wrong, most of the guys out there loved playing football, I loved playing it. But football is not the end for me. You know, I met my wife at Western. She’s from Gary, Indiana. When we were dating I told her, "I’m going to do this NFL thing for a few years and then I really want to go out to Los Angeles and make movies."
CHRIS NEUMER: I want to take you back to the effects thing in college. Do you like effects still?
TERRY CREWS: As an artist I just thought that was how I was going to get in. All my paintings were sci-fi related. And then with Spike Lee with She’s Gotta Have It, I read books on him about guerilla film making. And Michael Moore was from Flint, Michigan. And I thought, "I can do this." I never wanted to do acting or anything. But I tell you, my friend and I, his name is Derrick Carr, a guy I was playing football with on the Rams. He and I wrote a script and we put our money together and made a movie out in Detroit in the off-season. It was called Young Boys Incorporated, all about this gang that ran Detroit for a long time. The big thing about them was that they’d get young kids. Because then if the kids were picked up they’d go to juvie, when they were eighteen they’d be released and their slate would be wiped clean and they’d start all over again. So we made that movie. It was terrible. We put all our money together. I was hooked. I had just finished my first season with the Redskins. We’d get kicked out of locations. I loved it. I knew that’s what I wanted to do.
CHRIS NEUMER: Better than football?
TERRY CREWS: Better than football. I got cut by the Redskins then, and I got picked up by the Eagles, coached by Ray Rhodes. Then in ’97, we lost against the 49-ers and I was just done. My wife looked at me and she said, "Why don’t we go out to L.A.?" And I said okay.
CHRIS NEUMER: So you actually did Young Boys Incorporated in the off-season from football?
TERRY CREWS: Between the first season of the Redskins and me getting cut from the Redskins.
CHRIS NEUMER: Did anyone know that you were doing this?
TERRY CREWS: I tell you, I had a party to raise money, spent 15 grand on the party alone. People ate, drank and left. I thought all these bigwig ballplayers would give; you know I had all the big players come. Nothing, I lost money on that party. I think maybe someone put like $400 in the pot or something. I was like come on, throw me a bone!
CHRIS NEUMER: Just one earring from each player, that’s all you would need.
TERRY CREWS: Yeah. I was like come on man, you spend this much on attire, and that can’t even get you into the movies. We had meetings with all these players and they’d be like Um, um. It’s a good idea but… You know they thought it was a great idea, but when it came time to opening their checkbook, it was like, "Well I don’t know…" I can’t tell you how many times that happened. That hurt. So I came out here. And I was broke, because I was never that big of a star anyway.
CHRIS NEUMER: Who did you play for? I remember your name with the Chargers.
TERRY CREWS: The Rams, Packers, Chargers, Redskins, Eagles.
CHRIS NEUMER: What position did you play?
TERRY CREWS: Linebacker. And in between the Chargers and the Redskins I went to the World Football League and played in Germany.
CHRIS NEUMER: Like NFL Europe?
TERRY CREWS: Yeah, it was the first year after they brought that back, when they had an Orlando team, you know…
CHRIS NEUMER: Someone played for that…
TERRY CREWS: Kurt Warner. Gino Toretta was our QB.
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, he can cry at the Heisman all day long.
TERRY CREWS: He was so bad they had to send him back. He was hurting everything they were trying to do. It was pretty amazing. We were like, "Dude, this guy sucks." And he went right into commentating. He’s probably better off talking about it. That was when I got picked up by the Packers and that was right after Reggie White was just picked up, it was the beginning of that whole era.
CHRIS NEUMER: That was just a big deal that Reggie even agreed to go up there.
TERRY CREWS: Yeah, that was huge! Have you ever been up there?
CHRIS NEUMER: I went once. There’s not a ton up there to go to see is there? Isn’t it the smallest market for a professional sports team in America?
TERRY CREWS: And everybody loves it.
CHRIS NEUMER: The players or the fans.
TERRY CREWS: Both.
CHRIS NEUMER: Kind of like Salt Lake City, I remember when they started the Jazz they were having trouble attracting players to go up there because you can’t go out or anything. Not a lot of gold chain stores there.
TERRY CREWS: The thing about Green Bay is the nostalgia. There’s a history there. You know, Vince Lombardi and all that.
CHRIS NEUMER: I want to ask you something more about the films. So how did you ultimately pay for Young Boys Incorporated?
TERRY CREWS: We just put it out ourselves. My friends and I probably put up about thirty grand each. We were just paying for everything out of pocket, asking for favors. We had people who did believe in it and they were like, "Check it out man, here’s four grand here, five grand here." We just did it the way we are supposed to do it.
CHRIS NEUMER: So you and he wrote it, did you also direct it?
TERRY CREWS: He acted as director and I was the producer. But it wasn’t like a Coen brothers relationship.
CHRIS NEUMER: [Laughs]
TERRY CREWS: Who knows who does what. We were a team. I chose that title and he chose that one.
CHRIS NEUMER: You probably both had hands in each others’ jobs.
TERRY CREWS: Exactly. If he could bring some money in, cool. If I could help him with how the scenes were supposed to be designed, supposed to look, great. But we never really got finished. We got an hour and a half cut. When I moved out here, my friend and I had a fall out because I started associating with other people. Reginald Hudlin, who became my mentor; he did House Party, he did Boomerang with Eddie Murphy.
CHRIS NEUMER: Did he do some sitcom?
TERRY CREWS: He did "Boondocks".
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh yeah. I can’t wait to see that one. Did he also do "The P.J.’s"?
TERRY CREWS: No, actually, he did "Bébé’s Kids". He’s a big animation guy. "Bébé’s Kids" was the first African-American animated cartoon. He also did Serving Sara, which I was in.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s the one. Never saw it.
TERRY CREWS: Yeah. He directed that one. And actually, it’s so funny, because he saw my film in a barbershop. I gave a ten minute rough cut promotional trailer to one of my friends. He took it to a barber shop and they were like, "Oh yeah, yeah, I heard about this, put it in let’s play it." So he saw it on the VCR at the barber shop — Reggie was there — he gave [my friend] his card and said have your guy call me. I called him, we had a few meetings. No we never really got something off the ground. But still, he was mentoring me on other things. At this time, my friend and I went through a big fall out, which really stopped the production of our movie. Because he didn’t like the fact that I was talking to this guy about what the movie was about. He was like, hey, I’m such-and-such. And I said, but we’ve done things. And it was weird. We were in a different place. But we’re friends again. You know, I started doing security on movie sets. You know so I could be around the business and observe.
CHRIS NEUMER: You know, I read that. And it’s so funny how many guys started by doing security. I mean I read you were the president of the United States in 3001 and you know Tommy Lister did security and, was it Will Smith, who offered him a job as the president of the United States in Fifth Element.
TERRY CREWS: And Michael Clarke Duncan too.
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah, he’s been doing some interesting stuff lately. Sort of out of the mainstream; well, he’s obviously been doing some mainstream stuff too. But there’s also another ex-football player, but I think he was like Division 2, semi-pro. He was in The Italian Job, I don’t know if you ever saw it or not.
TERRY CREWS: Oh, yeah, the Latino guy?
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah. Franky G.
TERRY CREWS: He’s been doing a lot of stuff.
CHRIS NEUMER: You know, I interviewed him in New York. The nicest guy. You see him on film, kicking ass, taking names, looking tough. Well your arms put his to shame, frankly. But I mean, still, the size of my leg. He’s tough.
TERRY CREWS: He’s cut.
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh yeah, he’s in great shape. But he was saying, you know, I want this range, I want this. But I tell you, Chris, if one more person calls to ask me about Vin Diesel, I’m just going to go off on them. I said, Listen, Vin Diesel can’t act, he’s got a bad haircut, made bad career choices, and I thought that’s an interesting thing. Are you doing anything to separate yourself from Tiny Lister, Michael Clarke Duncan, and people like that?
TERRY CREWS: Well, listen, the thing is, it’s kind of automatic. But if you look at the parts I’ve played and the movies I’ve done… I mean you have to [work with] the stereotype. The stereotype gets you paid, it gets you in the business. If they’re looking for a white housewife, they’re going to go for Joan Cusack.
CHRIS NEUMER: They’re probably not going to come for you.
TERRY CREWS: They are not going to go for me, nine times out of ten! But the thing is, Joan Cusack, it’s about what she does with the role. She has her own brand of work that she does with it. The difference between me and Tiny is, for one, that Tiny has never been the greatest actor, you know what I mean, he hasn’t been able to do a lot of big talking [parts in] movies, or even… he kind of has one emotion. Now, Tiny’s a good friend of mine, and Tiny has done more with what he’s been given, in this town, than anyone else. He never looks at his career as an obstacle, he only looks at the positives. He’s done… he knows, he has an opportunity. I mean, you see in a script, "Tiny Lister" type, you know you’ve made your mark. I mean on Friday [After Next], that’s what everyone expected me to be — the new Tiny — because it was that sort of part — to fill that role — but if you look at the movie, there was a lot more there, you know.
CHRIS NEUMER: I have not seen the third [Friday movie] yet. I just know that you were a standout in it, playing a gay character.
TERRY CREWS: On all levels, I am just a poor kid crying out for help, that’s the real issue there, I mean, Damien doesn’t think he’s gay. If you called him gay, he’d probably smack you. I mean he doesn’t even know why he has these certain desires. He’s been institutionalized. He’d probably be like, I ain’t gay, you know! Certain things just turn him on. All it’s about is: you’re weak, I’m strong. Just like it is in the prison. They don’t think their gay. It’s just, You’re the weak one, and I am the strong one, so you give it up!
CHRIS NEUMER: What was that other Wayans Brothers movie, South Central…
TERRY CREWS: Don’t Be a Menace, South Central, yeah.
CHRIS NEUMER: They had that character who had just been let out of jail, he had a mirror, and he was always looking behind him.
TERRY CREWS: He had been institutionalized! That’s funny.
CHRIS NEUMER: Now, I am sure you’ve kept in touch with some of the guys you played football with. What do they think about this character? When they go to their local theater and Terry’s there, sort of effeminately walking around.
TERRY CREWS: One of the weirdest things was a guy I knew in high school got my number from my mom, called me up and was like, I can’t believe I’m talking to you. I was like, "it’s me, it’s Terry, I went to high school with you! What do you mean!?"
CHRIS NEUMER: It’s no longer the same Terry, it’s the Hollywood Terry.
TERRY CREWS: Yeah, it’s Hollywood! Or one thing is, a lot of ball players love the Friday movies, they’re big fans. I can go now to any team and be known now more for the movies than I was ever when I was playing. A lot of the guys have retired now. But I still get calls, congratulating me and that.
CHRIS NEUMER: There’s never been the other side? You know, the calls saying, Terry, How could you!?
TERRY CREWS: Oh yeah, the church members, yeah. I definitely do get that, "Whoa, man." But I also get the, "Whoa man, you’re a good actor because you were never like that. You were very straight-laced, four daughters, all that." And it was convincing. And so they’re like, "Whoa, that’s a change." So you want to get that whoa! I want it to be good. I’m in this business to be a good actor, you know. You want it to be believable.
CHRIS NEUMER: So what kind of approach do you take, are you a method man, or are you just saying I’m going to do what I would do if this is me, or do you just pretend?
TERRY CREWS: I kind of take a writer’s approach.
