SCORECARD
WATCHSOLOMON HUGHES plays 19-time All-Star
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Winning Time,
HBO’s excellent, raucous series about the
Showtime-era Lakers. For most actors,
the physical aspect of the assignment—convincingly
portraying a 7' 2", low-post legend—would be the
hard part. Hughes has that covered, though. He’s
6' 11", was a captain of the Cal hoops team and
played professionally, including a stint with the
Harlem Globetrotters.
The rest of it, though—the actual acting—is
uncharted territory. Hughes’s IMDb filmography
shows one acting credit: Winning Time. Before
getting the job he had gone on one audition for a
commercial—“I think it was for Advil,” he says—and
had never even acted in a high school play. (“My
life was basketball.”) When he got a call from a
casting agent working on the series, the 43-year-old
Hughes—who holds a Ph.D. in higher education from
Georgia—was working at Stanford on a fellowship
program aimed at creating a more diverse pool of
students in the school’s doctoral programs. You
know, your typical path to Hollywood stardom.
One of Hughes’s Cal teammates, Robbie Jones, has
been acting for two decades. “Watching him from a
distance, I was always intrigued,” says Hughes. And
it’s not like there’s an abundance of tall, basketball-
savvy aspiring actors out there. So when Hughes was
asked to audition for the role, he jumped and aced it.
The character he’s playing is meaningful to
Hughes. “Kareem’s autobiography, Giant Steps, is
one of the first autobiographies I read as a kid, like
right up there with Malcolm X’s,” says Hughes, who
grew up an hour outside of L.A. “The Lakers were the
center of our sports universe. My dad was like, ‘Watch
[Kareem]. That’s the guy you wanna know about.’
He really leaned into his intellectual curiosities—as a
writer, as a social justice activist. I love that he refuses
to just be boxed into who he is physically.”
Of course, Abdul-Jabbar is something of a physical
anomaly, a gangly guy who gracefully could rain
down skyhooks from anywhere near the basket. So
Hughes—who led the Pac-10 in field goal percentage
in 2000–01—had to perfect that shot. “I’d go to
24 Hour Fitness, find a side court, put music in and
just shoot hooks,” he says. “And I’m sure people were
like, Who is this crazy guy over there on the corner?”
The answer: one of the many stars in one of the
best series of 2022. —M.B.WA
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