LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers crashed out of the NBA playoffs earlier this week at the hands of the Denver Nuggets.
Asked after the game if he had played his last game — with the Lakers or in the NBA more generally — James was blunt: “I’m not going to answer that.”
At 39 years old, James continues to perform at an extremely high level on the court. He averaged 26 points, 8 assists and 7 rebounds a game while playing in 71 of the team’s 82 games.
Whether he plays or not next season (my guess is he will), James has made clear where he will head once he does decide to hang his jersey up — to the star-studded world of Hollywood.
James move to the Lakers in 2018 was widely seen as a sign of his future aspirations. As longtime LeBron chronicler Brian Windhorst wrote in 2019 in a piece entitled “LeBron's Move to L.A. Was All About His Next Phase in Hollywood”:
The L.A. move in 2018 was a business decision, the culmination of 15 years of learning, positioning, and exploiting the incredible fame and opportunities his basketball talents allowed. It was about how he was going to live for the next 50 years and what he’d leave his family when he was gone. That it came with nice weather, beaches, and an iconic basketball team was just the icing
Less than three months after his move to L.A. was official, so, finally, was Space Jam 2. It had been under discussion for at least five years at that point. Different writers, directors, and producers had been attached at various points along the way. Carter and LeBron had seen and rejected numerous scripts. They had many meetings about it, discussions over dinners, brainstorming on private jets, and long talks after games when LeBron was in Cleveland and Carter was in L.A. on the front line. Once he was a Laker, though, the deal went through.
“Space Jam 2” was James’ first starring role in a movie. It came out in 2021 to middling reviews and a disappointing box office performance.
But it’s not “Space Jam 2” that caught my eye when it came to LeBron, the actor. It was his understated — and amazing — role as himself in the 2015 film “Trainwreck” with Bill Hader and Amy Schumer.
James as a penny-pinching, Cleveland-loving basketball player was comedic gold.
To my mind, that is one of the best athlete cameos in movie history. But, what else belongs there? I have a few thoughts! As always, I want to hear from you — what did I miss?
Kareem Abul-Jabbar in “Airplane” (1980)
Jabbar as co-pilot “Roger Murdock” on a doomed airplane flight? Brilliant! And how the producers convinced him to do the movie is even better. Here’s what Jerry Zucker told the AV Club in 2015:
When we offered the role [of Murdock] to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, I think we offered him $30,000, and then the agent asked for $35,000 because that’s how much this rug cost that Kareem wanted to buy. It was an oriental rug—an art piece, not one to walk on, I don’t think—so our initial reaction was, “That’s got to be the best line we’ve ever heard from an agent.” It was like, “Boy, this guy’s really creative!” But then a couple of weeks later, there’s an article in Time with a picture of Kareem standing in front of the oriental rug that he’d bought for $35,000 after we’d paid him.
Brett Favre in “There’s Something About Mary” (1998)
Favre plays himself — sort of — in this movie. He’s the virtuous ex-boyfriend of the title character who makes a brief appearance toward the end of the movie. (Favre is not, pure as the driven snow in real life.) Favre was actually the third choice of the Farrelly brothers, who directed the movie, to play the football star ex-boyfriend. They initially went to Drew Bledsoe, the QB of the New England Patriots at the time, and then to Steve Young, the QB of the San Francisco 49ers. “Steve Young called one day and said 'That’s the funniest script I’ve ever read. But I cannot do it, because if I do it, it’s R-rated, and I know all the Mormon kids will be sneaking in and I wouldn’t feel good about that,’” recounted Peter Farrelly. Bledsoe later said passing on the movie was “one of my great regrets in life.”