breaking news;’An angel in my life’: How an unlikely coach brought Bo Cruz to life
Throughout his professional basketball career, Juancho Hernangomez has played for numerous coaches. He has played for six teams and spent seven seasons in the NBA alone.
(San Antonio), Michael Malone (Denver), Chris Finch (Minnesota again), or Nick Nurse—his current coach with the Toronto Raptors—to be “an angel in my life.”
The only acting coach he’s ever had, Noelle Gentile, deserves special recognition because she forged a strong and enduring friendship with Hernangomez while filming the Adam Sandler film Hustle, despite claiming to know nothing about professional sports and to be only five feet tall.
Hernangomez plays Bo Cruz in the Netflix original film, which debuted last summer. Sandler plays Stanley Sugarman, a hard-luck NBA scout who finds Bo Cruz in Europe and makes it his mission to bring him to North America. In it, Anthony Edwards, a star player for the Minnesota Timberwolves who collaborated closely with Gentile, portrays Kermit, the arrogant American who is predicted to be selected first overall and who humiliates Cruz at the NBA draft combine before telling him about it.
Bo and Kermit will play on the court together for the first time since Hustle came out on Thursday night in Minneapolis. It should be a nice reunion for the former Timberwolves teammates. Two off-seasons, in the fall of 2020 and again in 2021, were used to film the film.
The outbreak forced them to postpone the major basketball scenes until 2021, and they still hadn’t cast Cruz’s on-court antagonist. After playing together during Edwards’s rookie season, Hernangomez was the one who suggested Edwards for the position.
Hernangomez remarked, “I kind of told Adam and everybody, he was perfect for the role.” And I told him after a year together that he would be ideal for this part. He’s a nice kid, and we spent time together in Philadelphia (for the basketball scenes). I adore him, and I know he’s going to be an incredible basketball player. He’s an all-star man who puts in a lot of work, and I’m glad for his accomplishment.
Everything seems to fit together. Both critics and fans gave the film great reviews, and it currently has a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Both Hernangomez and the NBA players who generously sprinkled their own plays throughout the film gave it two thumbs up.
Seth Curry, a guard for the Brooklyn Nets, said of Adam, “I was talking to him on set and Adam was just raving about him and how good a job he did.” Curry worked on the dramatic basketball scenes for two days. I was eager to see it when it was out. Although having so many cameos can occasionally make a movie seem cheesy, Juancho actually performed in the film.
Alternatively, as Hernangomez’s boyhood buddy and Dallas Mavericks player Luka Doncic, who also made a fleeting appearance, put it: “[Acting] is a tough job.” I find it difficult to act in advertisements for two minutes at a time, therefore Juancho did a fantastic job.
For my part, I thought it was great because it succeeded in capturing the authenticity of basketball while remaining a Hollywood drama, something that most sports films fall short of. It manages to ring true between Sandler’s well-known affinity for basketball and the several NBA cameos scattered throughout the movie.
“My ex-wife watched it and she called and said ‘this is you,'” a seasoned NBA executive and talent assessor told me.
However, a significant contributing factor to the film’s popularity was Hernangomez’s ability to play the part convincingly. When the NBA season was suspended in 2020 because to a pandemic, Hernangomez saw an opportunity to pursue his first acting role, which he did a little bit on the side.
At first glance, it didn’t seem like much of a stretch: as a Spanish basketball player who made it to the NBA in real life, portraying a fictitious Spanish hooper attempting to break into the league seems like a natural fit.
Although there was plenty of running and dunking in the Spanish streetball scenes when Cruz is discovered, the all-star pick-up runs where he leaves his mark, and the various Rocky-esque, basketball-training montages in between, the character he played was more than just that. It turns out that Cruz is a single father who needs a huge break and has some unresolved issues, but he also has a tendency to stand in his own way.
Hernangomez had to put on a strong performance in a few situations, like the one when his mother tells him to go for his dreams despite his history, and the camera pans in to show him with his head lowered and very real tears streaming down his nose. Or his disagreement with Sandler/Sugarman, in which it appears that they both failed after making a huge leap of faith.