Shaquille O'Neal

Shaquille O'Neal is a basketball player who acts, and an honest account of his filmography has to start there. Nineteen seasons in the NBA across six teams, four championships, three Finals MVP awards, the league MVP in 2000, seven feet one and 325 pounds. The body is the casting. Nobody has ever hired him to disappear into a role.

Hollywood made two runs at turning him into a leading man and both are remembered for the wrong reasons. Kazaam in 1996 cast him as a rapping genie. Steel in 1997 handed him a DC superhero and a metal suit. Neither works, and the problem is less his acting than the writing: both films gave him a premise instead of a character. He is far better used where the film knows what it has. Blue Chips lets him play a recruited college centre and requires nothing he is not, and his appearance in He Got Game lands because that film is about the world he actually came from.

The rest is cameo work, and the credit list makes the pattern plain: in well over a dozen entries the character name is Shaquille O'Neal, or Shaq, or Self. Jack and Jill, The House Bunny, Good Burger, Scary Movie 4, What Men Want, When in Rome. Occasionally a film bothers to name him, as Blended and Grown Ups 2 do, and it changes nothing. He is a cheerful sport throughout. Uncle Drew in 2018 is the closest he has come to a real part in twenty years, for the obvious reason that it is a comedy about ageing basketball players.