Charles Barkley
Charles Barkley is an actor, born 1963.
Sixteen seasons in the NBA, eleven All-Star selections, eleven All-NBA teams, the 1993 Most Valuable Player award and a place on both the league's 50th and 75th anniversary sides: that is the career every screen credit on this page is standing on. He was short for a power forward and played the position anyway, using strength and leverage where other men used height, which is roughly the same manoeuvre he has run since as an analyst on TNT Sports and CBS Sports.
The film work is essentially one role, and the role is Charles Barkley. Most of the entries here list the character under his own name: the basketball gag in Hot Shots!, the referee comedy Forget Paris, He Got Game, Thunderstruck, an animated cameo in the Clerks series, and Space Jam, where he plays a version of himself in visible decline and never once winks at the camera to protect his own dignity. Playing a worse version of yourself on purpose is a real skill and he has it. Look Who's Talking Now! is the low point of that particular run and is best left where it is.
The later half of the page is documentary. The Last Dance, Shut Up and Dribble, They Call Me Magic, The Redeem Team and Stand all use him as a witness rather than a performer, which suits him, because he is one of the very few former players who will say something unflattering with the camera running. Rumble is the outlier: a straight voice performance as Rayburn Senior, and it suggests he could have done more of that than he has.
Movies (12)
TV (8)
Where to start with Charles Barkley
The cameo everyone actually means is Space Jam, and it holds up better than the film around it because he commits fully to being the punchline. He Got Game is by some distance the best picture he appears in, though his part is brief and he is playing himself in it. For the broadcaster rather than the player, go to The Last Dance, where he is given room to be blunt about people he knows, and then Shut Up and Dribble, which puts the same voice behind a serious argument about athletes and public speech. Hot Shots! is the early gag credit and is exactly as substantial as that sounds. Rumble is the one straight voice job here, as a monster wrestler's father, and it is the credit that suggests an actual second career he never really pursued. Skip Look Who's Talking Now!.