Patrick Ewing
Basketball is the reason Ewing has a filmography at all; the screen credits are what accumulated around the career. Jamaican-born, he was Georgetown's center in the early 1980s, then spent most of a seventeen-year professional career as the New York Knicks' starting center, closing it out with single seasons in Seattle and Orlando. He is regarded as one of the greatest Knicks of all time and as the spine of the teams that made the club matter in the 1990s, and he has stayed close to the franchise since.
On screen he plays himself, which he does with an appealing absence of vanity. Space Jam borrows his talent for its plot and lets him look baffled about it. Forget Paris drops him into a Billy Crystal romantic comedy. Senseless and The Life List use him as a walk-on with a punchline attached, decades apart.
The one credit that is genuinely a performance is his testimony in The Last Dance, where he is billed as the Georgetown center of 1981 to 1985 and talks as a rival who spent a decade being measured against Michael Jordan. Five screen credits, one of which matters: that is an honest ratio for an athlete who never claimed to be an actor.
Movies (5)
TV (1)
Where to start with Patrick Ewing
One item here is essential and the rest are trivia. The Last Dance uses Ewing as one of its better interviewees precisely because he lost so often to the man it is about. Listen to how carefully he talks about the Knicks years.
Space Jam is the cultural artifact. He is one of the NBA players whose game goes missing, and his bewilderment is funnier than the script deserves. Forget Paris is the most watchable film on the list on its own terms, a Billy Crystal comedy about an NBA referee, with Ewing appearing as himself.
Senseless and The Life List are cameos separated by nearly thirty years, and neither asks anything of him. Watch them only if you want the full set.