“We made this show as fans with a tremendous amount of respect and love for all of these characters, for the NBA, for the Lakers, and I think it hopefully shows on-screen,” Max Borenstein said about Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty at a TCA press conference. The series chronicles the professional and personal lives of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers, but the showrunner, executive producer, writer, and co-creator says the show was made for the fans, not the larger-than-life personas portrayed in it. “I can only imagine how strange it must be to have a movie made about your life or a show made about any aspect of your life, so I would never presume what people will or won't do but I know it'd be weird for me but on our end, this was made as fans with great love and appreciation.”
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The creators strike a fun tone in the series, which includes some fourth-wall-breaking where characters address the audience through the camera directly. “I had some preparation by playing Oliver Hardy, who's one of the great two-camera actors I've ever seen,” John C. Reilly explained, who stars as Jerry Buss, majority owner of the Lakers. “You kind of had to decide some qualities for your scene partner, the camera. Normally when you're acting with an actor, you can just see what they're giving off, but when you're looking into the camera, it's not no one that you're talking to. You're kind of talking to everyone. So I tried to be as specific and as intimate as I could be to build that relationship from episode to episode, so that you really felt comfortable when I was talking to you and lead the way through this story, here and there.”
Gaby Hoffmann plays Claire Rotham, general manager of The Forum where the Lakers played. “I don't do it that much, but I found it to be quite easy because of the way that it's written,” she said of speaking directly to the audience. “There's something about the dialogue and the pacing of everything that it just felt like another beat in what sometimes feels like, I don't know, jazz or something. And I just didn't think about it which is my big trick.”
For most of the cast, playing basketball superstars means they’re literally filling big shoes. “I’m playing an icon,” Quincy Isaiah said of his role as Magic Johnson, one of the greatest NBA players of all time. “That’s what I wanted to be, so for me to portray one of the greatest basketball players in the history of the game is incredible.” The role also comes with a physical component that brought additional challenges. “It's a basketball show so just trying to make sure that any basketball is on point and making sure that that's something I can lean back on and be like, ‘I did solid in this way. If nothing else, I looked like him on the court.’”
“There was the acting component, and then there was the physical component of trying to become a silhouette of these mountains of men,” Solomon Hughes explained, who plays Playing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “The advantage I felt like we had in this age of information is YouTube. There's lots of game footage, etc. So just watching just how they move on the court, etc. Obviously, that was a big part of this but there was also the freedom of knowing no one can shoot a sky hook like Kareem.”
“It was the single hardest casting challenge I've ever encountered,” executive director and pilot director Adam McKay revealed about casting the players. “Our casting director, Francine Maisler, would tell you the same thing. It was crazy, and to this day, I can't believe Quincy [Isaiah] and Dr. [Solomon] Hughes came our way. I mean it's unbelievable. These guys, hey can play ball, and they're really talented actors, and they're thoughtful, and they were collaborators. I've never experienced anything like it in all the years I've been doing it, and that goes for this whole cast. The whole cast is so unique. I mean DeVaughn [Nixon] is incredible. Tamera [Tomakili], amazing. Across the board, it was so cool to see how this cast just fell in line because the story of the Showtime Lakers involves so many different people and so many different points of view and backgrounds.”
Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty premieres Sunday, March 6th at 10/9c on HBO and streaming on HBO Max.