On Set With Basketball Star Steph Curry, The Acting Rookie

Steph Curry is locked in.

He's perched on a bench, sunken into his thoughts, eyes closed as onlookers wait to see magic. We've seen this before. It’s the quiet before the splash, the meditation before the massacre. This is the moment before he turns into a sentient three-point Terminator shooting from anywhere on the court. We've all seen this Steph Curry, but not this Steph Curry.

In a split-second, the 36-year-old basketball savant opens his emerald green eyes, stops mumbling words only he can hear, and jogs onto the mid-day, sun-drenched court, ready to "dunk on disease," he zealously proclaims.

Cut!

Let’s retry that.

From Pro To Rookie All Over Again

The Steph Curry inside of one of America's oldest athletic country clubs, The Olympic Club in San Francisco, on June 29 was the four-time NBA Champion in reputation alone. On that day, he was filming the season finale of Peacock's mockumentary-style sports comedy Mr. Throwback, his first starring role in a TV series. For the first time since 2009, Curry was a rookie in every sense of the word.

"On the very first day, I was still trying to find my rhythm and getting used to the style of how we were going about each scene. I heard a note from [producer] David Wain. Ego [Nwodim] didn't hear it, so I told her, 'They want us to do this and this.' As I was walking away she told me, 'Don’t ever tell me what to do,' with a straight face. I didn't know how to take it." Curry tells Complex as Nwodim bursts into laughter.

Co-produced by Curry's multimedia production company Unanimous Media, he stars as an exaggerated version of himself opposite Saturday Night Live alum and comedic alchemist Ego Nwodim and Happy Endings star Adam Pally, who may or may not have called himself and Nwodim the "Steph Curry of improv." Premiering all six episodes on August 8, Mr. Throwback sees Pally playing Danny Grossman, a distressed failure-in-life who peaked in sixth grade as a controversial star basketball player who was better than Curry. In an effort to get himself out of some life-threatening debt, Grossman weasels his way back into Curry’s life with a sob story that somehow spirals into the Golden State Warriors legend commissioning a documentary on his life.

The show has Curry slapping inspiration into Grossman's face, a father-son relationship that borders on psychological abuse, and the Splash Siblings predating the Splash Brothers. Yes, this is exactly the type of story Curry wants to tell.

"Everything we work on has to be aspirational and inspirational. Central themes are family-based," says Erick Peyton, Unanimous Media's co-founder and chief creative officer. "Sometimes, a family story could be about old friends like in the case of Mr. Throwback. We look to tell these really traditional family and sports stories in a human way."

Peyton co-founded Unanimous Media with Curry in 2018. Since then, he has documented his basketball origin story (Underrated) and hosted a strange pandemic-proof celebrity Olympics of household chores (Ultimate Home Championship), all while executive producing an Oscar-winning short doc (The Queen of Basketball) and growing a sizable slate of family-friendly content. But nothing the company does in Hollywood supersedes what he does on the court.

"The main thing remains the main thing," Peyton says.

Two Sides Of The Same (Performance) Coin

Every facet of the Steph Curry we know has some connection to basketball, and the thespian newbie on set was never too far removed from the world-class athlete he is. In a strange way, they were co-stars.

Decked in a coral green-and-black warmup windbreaker, Curry's first scene of the day involved him trying to inspire a morally conflicted Grossman to marvel at the charity basketball game he put together based on his sympathetic disease story at the heart of the show's plot. His fictional Curry Up and Wait Productions CEO Kimberly Gregg, played immaculately by Nwodim, ends up taking her frustrations out by knocking over Dunkee, a furry, orange-colored mascot. Stunned, Curry tells Gregg she's gone too far and asks her to leave. The scene ends with her hilariously fighting her way out of one of the banners while storming out of the gym as Curry and Grossman exit the frame.

What audiences won't see when they stream the season finale is Curry unable to make it through three or four consecutive takes without nearly collapsing in laughter when Dunkee kept falling over, or slipping up on a few inspirational lines to Grossman, or him pacing back and forth with script in hand after his co-stars had been knocking lines out of the park hours before he arrived at 4 p.m. His acting inexperience was glaring in every redone take and every "That’s ok" his co-stars offered. He looked more like a surprise cameo than an anchor of an entire series.

Then the strangest thing happened. He started to act how he played basketball.

The laughs in between bad takes got shorter and his delivery became more reflexive. He went five takes without messing up a line consecutively. The sudden shift resembled how he'd miss his first five shots and still knock back a 35-ft three-pointer; he's trained to forget mistakes and trust preparation. "It's next-play mentality," he says. "You might forget a line, need some help, and then you're ready. If you take yourself too seriously where you have a perfectionist kind of attitude, it's not going to work because you get stuck in your head."

That preparation looked like taking the sliver of free time he had during the season to sit for Zoom table reads with cast and crew. That dedication looked like fitting five straight, 10-12 hour days of filming into a schedule that included the birth of his fourth child weeks earlier, reporting to practices for USA Basketball Men's Olympic Team a week after his final day on set, and not stepping in front of the camera if he felt he couldn't show the art of acting the same level of respect he'd expect from someone entering an NBA game.

"I was a little nervous to jump into something like this because you want to do it right," Curry says. "You respect the craft of what they do and trained for and dedicated their life to."

Improvisation On The Court And On The Set

When Dunkee fell to the pavement for the sixth time, Curry went off script and hilariously reminded Gregg, "There's a man in there," after doing multiple takes of simply asking Dunkee if he was alright. He recognized that asking about a mascot's well-being was poking fun at the fact there's a person dressed as an orange basketball. This added an improvisational flair to the flow of the scene, almost like looking one way to draw a defender into that direction and passing the opposite way to a teammate freed up by Curry's spontaneous misdirection. The comedic timing for an acting novice was impressive, until I remembered exactly who Steph Curry really is and what he's all about: prediction.

No, Curry isn't particularly known for his catchy one-liners in interviews. He isn't much of a jokester, either. Actually, part of his public image is centered on being predictably on-point. There's no off-court drama, rarely any cursing, and you may be more likely to hear Christian rapper Lecrae than "Dopeman" rapper BossMan Dlow if you hit shuffle on one of his playlists. On set, Gregg and Grossman acted out a scene where she had to come up with a lie as to why his fake Teen Steph TV series was dropped by Disney. Her solution was to tell him they wanted teenage Curry to say “the C-word,” which Grossman instinctively knew was “crap.” It's an exaggeration, but a lot of truth is said in jest.

Still, he moves on the court with the rhythm of a jazz musician, twisting and turning in an improvisational rhythm with the timing of a jester. How else would you describe someone who dribbles taller grown men into ACL-tearing circles, tosses a shot in the air, and in those grown men's faces, rests his head on a pillow made out of his hands just to tell them “night night” before gravity has the final word on where the ball lands? If he can do that, surely stringing a sudden five-word joke together on the fly is child's play.

Right before they filmed the scene of Gregg knocking down the mascot in front of Curry, the co-stars were in the entryway of the gym waiting for their cue to enter the scene. He compared it to being in "the tunnel before for the starting lineup [announcements]" where you have to figure out how to handle the "pregame nerves that are going on." That's also where he first locked in by shutting out everything around him. That was the moment Steph Curry the basketball player gave Steph Curry the actor a timely assist.

"There’s a lot of visualization. Once you get out there, it's kinda just reacting. That's very much how basketball is," he says. "The close your eyes thing is like calming the nerves and reminding yourself to not take yourself too seriously and have fun."

The main thing is always the main thing.

I may have had some initial reservations about Curry's performance, but there was never any visible frustration from his co-stars. That could partly be because, no matter how many lines he missed, he's still the executive producer and an immutable component of the show that probably wasn't going to fire himself. But Pally—a man who's acted in movies and shows alongside Robert De Niro, Mindy Kaling, and Arnold Schwarzenegger—was sold on Curry's acting chops after he got laughs during the first table read over Zoom. "I haven't thought once, 'Oh, I have to take care of Steph,'" Pally says. "I just look at him like an actor."

Teamwork Always Makes The Dream Work

Curry will be the first to tell you he wouldn't be where he is without a team. His Mr. Throwback trio of himself, Nwodim, and Pally felt like a comedic All-Star troupe with camaraderie born from respect and circumstance rather than memories and history. He's comfortable enough to discuss the seating arrangements of children at the dining room table during downtime and cracks up as Nwodim channels her inner Draymond Green when she's "happy to insult Steph to his face."

On-screen, the rapport can sometimes feel contrived, as if they're trying too hard to give the seamless chemistry you'd expect from grade-school friends. But, like an All-Star team or the Olympics squad Curry's currently on, you see the joy they felt in finding out what their collective talents could achieve together, which translated into dazzling performances. "We were having so much fun making it, which doesn't necessarily mean people will enjoy it, but I think that shines through," Nwodim says.

That Steph Curry "gravity" is also real. In basketball circles, this idea of his gravity speaks to his star power being so immense that defenses will shift to whatever side of the court he’s on. The show started filming in early May in Chicago but moved to San Francisco after Curry’s son was born on May 26, six weeks earlier than planned and less than a month into filming. Pally says the entire show's production planned for not having Curry on set until after Game 7 of the NBA Finals, which the Warriors got nowhere near. There’s a magnetism the basketball star emits where his quiet confidence draws onlookers whether he’s doing a silly dance in between scenes to keep his funny bone active or staring into space trying to remember a line. Even celebrities that appeared in the episode had their lips in conversations and their eyes on him.

While watching him on set, it's hard not to think this is part of his answer to the question that will imperceptibly loom over every interview he does going forward: What's next after basketball? He's far closer to the end of his basketball career than he is to the start of it, which made it curious that he chose to do his first starring TV role now. He didn't say if acting will be in his post-retirement plans, but he does want to do "another season, and another season, and another season" of Mr. Throwback, echoing LeBron James' infamous prediction of winning "not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven" championships with the Miami Heat. Peyton, Unanimous Media's co-founder and chief creative officer, also admits that before the first season wrapped, there were early discussions about how the show could continue on for years to come.

"I don’t see any reason why we couldn't do this 100 times," Pally says, mirroring Curry's intention and Peyton's sentiment. "We have the greatest shooter of all-time. It could be as much of a hook as white people in an office."

Sure, Curry could possibly do this show until he's 60 years old. But wouldn't the greatest long-distance shooter want to add more range? His IMDB is just him playing himself over and over again. Does he want to be an actor or does he simply want to "scratch an itch," as he describes the Mr. Throwback role? While his next plans involve releasing his first graphic novel, Sports Superheroes, and an animated sports comedy series called GOAT, his next acting role may be an inevitability.

"I want to do everything with the right intention of doing it the best that I can," Curry says. "So whenever that time comes, as long as I feel prepared to do it, I'm open to it."

As for now, he's locked in on the main thing remaining the main thing for as long as he can.

That's a wrap!