Every seat in the gym is filled. Stephen Curry sits silently on the bench. His head leans forward, his back arches, and his eyes close. You know the look. You’ve seen it a hundred times. He’s had a slow start, missed a few he should’ve hit. It’s time to lock in.
Curry stands, walks towards the hoop, and delivers…a joke?
See, we’re not in Oracle Arena, and Curry isn’t playing basketball. Instead, we’re on set: today is the last day of filming for Mr. Throwback, an upcoming Peacock series (premiering Thursday, August 8th) co-starring Adam Pally and the greatest shooter in NBA history. The series centers on a down-on-his-luck merchandise dealer played by Pally who calls on his childhood friend for help. Curry plays that friend—a world-famous basketball star named Stephen Curry, who is basically real-life Steph turned up to 11.
In recent years, Curry has proven that he can do just about anything: golf, producing, nonprofit work, on-ball defense. But acting is a new challenge. Only, the way he sees it, it’s not so different from his day job. “Yeah, I just visualized what I wanted to do,” Curry tells me of nailing his take. “It wasn’t just the small tight-knit crew. It was a big, big environment, so that’s where you feel the pressure. If everybody else is on and delivering, you don’t be the one that’s messing up the take.”
Pally and the rest of the show’s stellar cast—led by Saturday Night Live’s Ego Nwodim, and featuring an extremely eccentric performance by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts—have been shooting in Chicago for a month. For six final days in San Francisco, they’re joined by Curry. The Golden State Warriors’ star leaves for Team USA practices in a week, and the show premiers in a month—during the Summer Olympics, which will also air on Peacock. In Hollywood terms, that’s a 100-meter dash of a schedule. “I think it maybe is crazy,” Nwodim says, when I ask if she’s ever been part of a production like this one. “We are people that like chaos. I enjoy the madness.”
“We both worked at places like SNL and Happy Endings where that’s all it was,” Pally adds, grinning. “My happy place is when other people are freaking out.”
Curry, on the other hand, is “the most organized, regimented” person Pally’s ever met. “He is exceptional at everything. And if he’s not exceptional, he will work at whatever it is until he’s exceptional,” Pally says. “He came in one day and knew lines that Ego and I did not know. We were like, ‘We gotta button up! Stephen Curry knows our lines.”
Curry tells me he practiced with his wife Ayesha and his kids to make sure he was off book by the time the production arrived. He wanted to have the script down pat, so he could be “coachable,” incorporating notes from director David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer) into his performance. “Not just saying the lines, but facial expressions,” Curry says. “I’m a huge headnodder, so I gotta try not to do that, because I’m in the scene like—” He puts on a shit-eating grin and starts pantomiming a bobblehead. “I feel like I got better,” he continues. “Everything in life is just reps.”
