Kevin Garnett
Garnett played twenty-one seasons in the NBA, mostly as a power forward, and is one of a very small group of players to have won both Most Valuable Player and Defensive Player of the Year. The intensity was the brand: he talked constantly, defended everything, and was frightening to play against by design.
Screen work was never the job. There are three credits here and one of them counts. That one is Uncut Gems, where the Safdie brothers cast him as himself, chasing a black opal through Adam Sandler's disintegrating jewellery business. It is a real performance and not the sort athletes usually give in cameos. Garnett is asked to be superstitious, wired and slightly menacing, to sit inside a film whose whole method is overlapping panic, and he does not soften any of it or wink at the camera once.
The rest is small. The comedy Go On gave him a straight appearance as himself in 2012, and back in 1996 he turned up as Wilt Chamberlain in Rebound, a biopic of the Harlem playground legend Earl Manigault. That is the entire filmography, and given how good the main item is, it is enough.
Movies (2)
TV (1)
Where to start with Kevin Garnett
There is exactly one real recommendation here, and it is a strong one: Uncut Gems. Watch it for the sequence in the locker room, where a man who spent two decades being interviewed about superstition gets to play superstition as an actual belief system. It is also one of the most stressful films of its decade, so pick your evening.
Go On is a pleasant sitcom appearance and nothing more. Rebound: The Legend of Earl 'The Goat' Manigault is the curiosity, a 1996 basketball biopic that casts a very young Garnett as Wilt Chamberlain, made years before anyone thought of him as someone who could act.