I say “was” because I haven’t played it in a while, so I’ve lost a lot of that. And I learned that I was really good at playing the saxophone. I got a saxophone coach who was also in the film and we played for just over a year. I love the process more than anything, sometimes even more than the actual moment. I didn’t have to, but I chose to because I love preparation.
FOR SECOND ACT NNAMDI PREPARATION BYWORD HOW TO
You found your way back to an instrument.ĭid you have to learn how to play the tenor saxophone for “Sylvie’s Love”?
It was both devastating and also affirming. And that was the start of my football career. That was the last time I ever played the piano. It was this big thing and I had to run laps. One day, I was late for practice and my coach said, where were you? I said I’m sorry, I had a recital. The first year I played football was the last year I played the piano. The same preparation I need to get ready for a football game or football season, I’ve brought that to acting.Īsomugha, right, in 2008 when he was playing for the Raiders.Īsomugha, right, in 2008 when he was playing for the Buck/European Pressphoto Agency I advise people all the time, get your kids into sports because sports shaped my life - from discipline and patience and hard work and falling down and needing to get back up and not complaining. I wanted to just start creating the projects so people can say, oh, OK, he does know what he’s doing.ĭo you often take lessons and experience from your football career and apply them to your acting career? I wasn’t just coming out of Yale or Juilliard. It’s an identity crisis, like, do I have any more things to look forward to in life? All the traumatic things you tell yourself. You go through this period of soul-searching when you finish doing something that you’ve done for the last 20-something years of your life. While I was still in the N.F.L., but I didn’t make the decision until probably a year after. player when you got bit by that bug, or was this after your career?
I didn’t know that it was necessarily going to be producing, but I knew I wanted to go into acting. Because the love you have for it is what will sustain and lead you. When I finished playing, the advice I kept getting from former players was find something to do that you are absolutely in love with. I was just obsessed with movies and television growing up. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. He spoke recently via video about making the transition from football to acting, preparing for “Sylvie’s Love” (directed by Eugene Ashe) and the unexpected experience of appearing on Broadway. “You can’t help what you fall in love with, and I fell in love with acting.” It’s “mind-boggling that I would even want to go from one career where you’re under such a microscope in an extreme way to another career where the microscope might even be bigger,” Asomugha said. ImageAsomugha opposite Tessa Thompson in “Sylvie’s Love.”Īsomugha opposite Tessa Thompson in “Sylvie’s Love.”Credit.Amazon Studiosīut before acting and producing, Asomugha was considered one of the best cornerbacks in the National Football League, playing 11 seasons for the Oakland Raiders and other teams before retiring in 2013. Behind the scenes, he has helped produce projects through his production company, iAm21 Entertainment, including “Sylvie’s Love,” “Crown Heights” and “Harriet,” as well as the Broadway play “American Son” (2018), which starred his wife, the actress Kerry Washington. Earlier this year, he made what the Hollywood Reporter called “a promising Broadway debut” in a new staging of “A Soldier’s Play” by Charles Fuller. 23, is set largely in midcentury New York and explores the ebbs and flows of the relationship between Robert (Asomugha), a charismatic jazz saxophonist, and Sylvie (Tessa Thompson), a determined television producer.Īsomugha is considered a rising star in Hollywood: In 2017, his breakout performance in the drama “Crown Heights” earned Indie Spirit and NAACP Image Award nominations. “Sylvie’s Love,” which made its Amazon premiere on Dec. “And then immediately I was like, OK, I think people need to see this film.” “There was no way that I was going to do a romantic film until I read the script and saw that there were Black people falling in love in the ’50s and ’60s,” Nnamdi Asomugha, 39, said. The lead in a romance may seem like a prize for most actors, but the star of the new drama “Sylvie’s Love” had reservations. Now he’s playing a jazz saxophonist in a new movie. Nnamdi Asomugha gave up piano for football early in his life.
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