Terry Crews

Contradictions are an interviewer’s best friend. Guaranteed to stir up controversy or provide a one-of-a-kind hook for readers, a good contradiction is worth its weight in gold. Glancing over actor Terry Crews’ bio sheet while sitting in the office of […]

by Chris Neumer

Contradictions are an interviewer’s best friend. Guaranteed to stir up controversy or provide a one-of-a-kind hook for readers, a good contradiction is worth its weight in gold. Glancing over actor Terry Crews’ bio sheet while sitting in the office of his publicist, I have spotted no fewer than three contradictions.

The biggest of these is the fact that Crews played in the NFL for six seasons, can still bench press a large sumo wrestler (“I bench about 475,” Crews tells me, with the caveat that he hasn’t actually done a single repetition in a long time) and is best known for his role as Friday After Next’s gay gangster, Damon. During Crews’ photo shoot with the magazine, he is actually approached by three college kids in a banged up Toyota who refuse to leave until he acknowledges the fact that his creation of Damon is “the bomb”. Crews reluctantly does and waves to them as their car sputters off into the Hollywood Hills.

After his NFL career wound down in 1997 and he and his wife moved to LA, Crews accepted a number of extremely small roles in projects like The Sixth Day, Serving Sara and Training Day. He landed the latter role because he simply showed up on the project’s set to visit a friend. “I had met [director] Antoine Fuqua a few weeks earlier,” Crews laughs, “I went down there just to watch. Antoine was like, ‘You want to be in this? Go to wardrobe and get dressed, I’ll put you in.’”

With these bit parts to his name, Crews was cast in Friday After Next to play his first recognizable supporting character of Damon. He made the most of his opportunity. Not only did Crews’ performance catch the eye of casting agents and directors, it changed the way even his friends looked at him. “One of the weirdest things was that this guy I knew in high school got my number from my mom, called me up and said, ‘I can’t believe I’m talking to you.’” Crews chuckles and says, “I was like, ‘What are you talking about, it’s me! It’s Terry! I went to high school with you!’”

In spite of his occasional on-screen roles as the villain and his status as a former NFL linebacker, Crews is extremely affable in person. He laughs more times than I can count during our lunch together–not that you’d know he’s capable of smiling from his pictures–and is as genuinely a nice guy as you can imagine. As Crews is giggling his way through the explanation of why he is so excited to play the President of the United States in writer/director Mike Judge’s latest project, tentatively called 3001, stopping at times to go off on tangents as wide ranging as how he and his good friend, Derek Luke, caused a commotion by laughing during Benecio del Toro’s failed suicide attempt in 21 Grams to why Janet Jackson really screwed up during her much talked of Super Bowl performance, I can only think back to a line of dialogue that Jon Stewart delivered in Death to Smoochy: “He’s a bottle of pancake syrup with legs!”

As we talk more, I begin to realize that Crews is the exact opposite of what anyone would ever expect. When he tells me that he was offered a scholarship to attend Western Michigan University as an undergraduate, I naturally assumed it was for football. Crews dispels this some minutes later when he says, “To be honest, I was always more a film guy than an athlete. My scholarship to Western was an art scholarship. I just walked onto the football team.” In response to my quizzical look, he assures me, “I’m actually a sci-fi guy.”

More than just a sci-fi guy, Crews is a genuine film buff with tastes as disparate as can be. One moment we are talking about the truthful nature of director Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday, the next minute we’re onto the stunning dramatic tension Crews saw in director Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse. “I love that movie,” he gushes. “I’m a 350 pound black man and I could understand what it was like to be a little white girl.”

Crews’ perspective on acting is as unusually on-the-ball as everything else about the man. Far from employing varying degrees of actor-speak to shroud his actual feelings, Crews comes right out and says what he thinks. “A lot of actors goof off on-screen and go, ‘How can I look good?’” He shakes his head. “Then you watch the movie and see two people who are trying to look good and it’s horrible. My thing about acting is I go in and ask, ‘How can I make the other guy look good or look like the star? How can I improve the guys around me?”

The consummate team player, Crews is quickly earning respect from his fellow actors because he shuns the limelight. “Nobody wants to take the low road in acting,” Crews says very matter-of-factly. “So I immediately go in to the scenes and say to the other actors, ‘Hey, it’s about you. Let’s make you look good.’” He grins another broad grin and says with an element of surprise in his voice. “The funny thing is that it’s turning around,” Crews starts. “People come up to me and are like, ‘You made that guy look great!’ and I keep getting hired.”