Solomon Hughes plays 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 was working at Stanford on a fellowship program aimed at creating a more diverse pool of students in the school’s doctoral programs. Hughes—who holds a Ph.D. in higher education from Georgia—got that job while writing his dissertation, which deals with Don Hossler’s model of college choice and how it applies to high school football players, “specifically how recruiting impacts the way they think about higher education.” 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. The entertainment bug, which he calls “one of the currents within my family,” had been biting at him even before that. He’s related to the actress Ethel Ayler, whose roles included Clair Huxtable’s mother on The Cosby Show, and another relative was a founding member of the Four Tops. 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.
