The N.B.A. player and star of the new basketball movie, “Hustle,” talks about his first foray into Hollywood and his cultural interests off the court.
The N.B.A. player Juancho Hernangómez, a power forward with the Utah Jazz, lives for basketball — now. But as boys, he and his older brother, Willy, a center with the New Orleans Pelicans, had different aspirations. Despite both of their parents having been professional ballers, “We wanted to be soccer players as every kid in Spain,” he said in a video call from his home in Madrid.
But then he grew to 6 feet 9 inches. After which, “I just fall in love with basketball,” he said. “That’s my only goal.”
So when his agent suggested he audition for “Hustle,” Adam Sandler’s latest movie, premiering on Netflix on June 8 and in select theaters next month, Hernangómez was understandably hesitant. “I didn’t know if I was going to be good,” he said.
Urged on by his brother and sister, Andrea, also a basketball player, he propped up his phone on the kitchen table and had a little fun acting out the script. Several casting rounds later, followed by Zoom calls from Sandler and the movie’s director, Jeremiah Zagar, he’d landed the role.
In “Hustle,” Hernangómez plays Bo Cruz, a Spanish street ball phenom in Timberland boots plucked from obscurity by Sandler’s Stanley Sugerman, a bone-tired scout for the Philadelphia 76ers. Sugerman recognizes potential in his undiscovered talent, but Cruz, who has a volatile temper and is raising a young daughter, carries some heavy baggage.
As for a career in Hollywood, Hernangómez, who considers himself “a normal 26-year-old guy,” has no pretensions. “I cannot say I’m never going to do a movie because that’s not true,” he said. “It’s got to be the right movie.”
“But if this is my only movie, I’m going to die so happy,” he said as he described the things that excite him off the court — good wine, street art and classic cars. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
1. Wine Tastings I love to go and know more about wine with my family, with my friends. It’s the connection. It’s the energy. The mood. I can be talking with a glass of wine for hours. And I want to keep learning. I love to ask about the history of the wines, why they do that in that location. Wine is recollection. It is waiting, patience.
2. Street Art The father of the director, Jeremiah Zagar, his name is Isaiah Zagar, and he’s an artist in Philly. He started doing that on the streets of Philly, and all of Philly has got something special of him. I feel in Spain they kill the art instinct. The education system is really bad, and they’ve got to change because in America, they develop the talent — singing or painting or playing the guitar, whatever the talent is.
3. Experiencing New Cultures Now when I’m going to a city, I try to wake up early to walk around just to see the art or to see the buildings, how the people eat, how the people drink coffee, how the people talk. It’s beautiful. A lot of my teammates, they’ve never been out of America. They told me, “I travel a lot. I went to Mexico.” And I was like, “Brother, but this is not traveling.”
4. Local Food Because we are N.B.A. players, we go to fancy restaurants. But I told them, “I’m not going to eat in fancy restaurants. I want to go to the local restaurant.” If I go Italy, I want the dirty restaurant where they’ve been open since 1920 and they were a hundred years doing the best pizza. When I’m going to San Francisco, I eat the seafood there, even if you get dirty doing the crab thing.
5. Classic Cars My dream is to have a Mustang from 1968, ’69. I’m still looking because it’s hard to find a good one. When I get to be 70 years old, I’ll give it to my son, his son will give it to his son — three, four, five generations, like a family thing. Classic cars, you take care of them like your kids.
6. Following the Economy We’re living in a world where the changes are really quick, so you’ve got to be ready. You see what happened with the cryptocurrencies in the last year. Everybody went crazy. Now it’s going down. I love to read every day what they say, how people predict things that never happen, then the people who [others] say were wrong when they were true. My dad always tells me if you invest in something, believe that you lost it so you don’t regret it.
7. The Hermanos Hernangómez Basketball Camp It’s the thing that I’m most proud of. We made a camp, my brother and myself and my sister, for two weeks in Spain, in my hometown, and the kids go to play basketball. But it’s not just for basketball. They go to the swimming pool. They’ve got art. They’ve got English class. They play soccer. We go there every single day. I love kids so much, so I’m playing with them. Parents always tell me, “It was the best week of his life.”
8. Country Music I didn’t hear country until I went to Denver [to play with the Nuggets]. I went to Red Rocks and they put on a country concert and it was unbelievable. You see the sunset. It’s just the vibe. There’s something special about Red Rocks that makes that even better.
9. Learning About the Film Industry Before I came to Hollywood, I never expected it was going be like that. How hard they work behind the scenes. How many hours, how many efforts. How many quarantines, how many Covid tests. Everybody with a mask. The last day on set, I rented a truck of sushi for all the crew. I was like, “I’ve been working for you two months and I didn’t even see your face.”
10. Asturias, Spain I just bought a place there, and it’s probably the place where I was happiest in my life. Asturias is in the north of Spain. It’s in the mountains, and they’ve got the sea, too. There’s no wifi, no connection. You wake up, everybody cooks together. Then we go to see the horses, the cows, the chickens. The food is so healthy, so fresh. We play board games all day. At night we’re sitting outside, and you can see the stars so bright. There’s no pollution, no contamination. It’s another world.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
