Hooked on Acting: How Solomon Hughes Turned Into Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Hughes is a 40-something academic with zero practical experience. Who better to portray a legendary complex basketball icon?

Solomon Hughes plays Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Winning Time, HBO’s excellent, raucous series about the Showtime-era Lakers. For most actors, the physical aspect of the assignment—convincingly portraying a 7’ 2”, low-post legend—would be the hard part. Hughes has that covered, though. He’s 6’ 11”, was a captain of the Cal hoops team and played professionally, including a stint with the Harlem Globetrotters.

The rest of it, though—the actual acting—is uncharted territory. Hughes’s IMDb filmography shows one acting credit: Winning Time. Before getting the job he had gone on one audition for a commercial—“I think it was for Advil,” he says—and had never even acted in a high school play. (“My life was basketball.”) When he got a call from a casting agent working on the series, the 43-year-old Hughes was working at Stanford on a fellowship program aimed at creating a more diverse pool of students in the school’s doctoral programs. Hughes—who holds a Ph.D. in higher education from Georgia—got that job while writing his dissertation, which deals with Don Hossler’s model of college choice and how it applies to high school football players, “specifically how recruiting impacts the way they think about higher education.” You know, your typical path to Hollywood stardom.

One of Hughes’s Cal teammates, Robbie Jones, has been acting for two decades. “Watching him from a distance, I was always intrigued,” says Hughes. The entertainment bug, which he calls “one of the currents within my family,” had been biting at him even before that. He’s related to the actress Ethel Ayler, whose roles included Clair Huxtable’s mother on The Cosby Show, and another relative was a founding member of the Four Tops. And it’s not like there’s an abundance of tall, basketball-savvy aspiring actors out there. So when Hughes was asked to audition for the role, he jumped and aced it.

Solomon Hughes portrays NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in HBO's Winning Time.  :: Courtesy of Warrick Page/HBO

The character he’s playing is meaningful to Hughes, who shares an intellectual bent with Abdul-Jabbar. “Kareem’s autobiography, Giant Steps, is one of the first autobiographies I read as a kid, like right up there with Malcolm X’s,” says Hughes, who grew up an hour outside of L.A. “The Lakers were the center of our sports universe. My dad was like, ‘Watch [Kareem]. That’s the guy you wanna know about.’ He really leaned into his intellectual curiosities—as a writer, as a social justice activist. I love that he refuses to just be boxed into who he is physically.”

Of course, Abdul-Jabbar is something of a physical anomaly, a gangly guy who gracefully could rain down skyhooks from anywhere near the basket. Hughes describes himself as “an incredibly anxious player. I didn’t have a lot of confidence, but I shot a jump hook really well, and I shot it well enough to where I led the Pac-10 [as the conference was known in 2000–01] in field goal percentage.”

But a jump hook is not a sky hook, so Hughes had to perfect that shot. “I’d go to 24 Hour Fitness, find a side court, put music in and just shoot hooks,” he says. “And I’m sure people were like, Who is this crazy guy over there on the corner?”

He also watched as much video as he could on Abdul-Jabbar—and not just on-court action. “The blessing in this information age is just the documentation, right?” Hughes says. “On YouTube, there’s all sorts of footage of him playing. but there are also interviews, there’s also his speeches, his talks, his podcast, his documentary on HBO, which is just beautiful—A Minority of One. He’s obviously a prolific writer, and so reading the books that he wrote about himself, as well as the books he’s written about other people, I just tried to better understand and hear his voice.”

Courtesy of Warrick Page/HBO

While it was certainly a thrill for Hughes to be playing one of his heroes, the fact remains that the show (which is based on the book Showtime, by former SI writer Jeff Pearlman and premieres Sunday night) isn’t afraid to show Abdul-Jabbar’s, shall we say, crustier side. In the pilot, Hughes has two big scenes, both of which feature him telling another character to f--- off. In the second one it’s Norm Nixon, who is played by the longtime Laker’s son, DeVaughn Nixon. In the other, it’s the cute kid who’s acting opposite him in the memorable Airplane cockpit scene, which Hughes nails. “You’re talking about someone who knew no such thing as anonymity,” says Hughes. “Since he was a high schooler, people have wanted things from him. He was the most recognizable person on the planet, arguably. So I feel like there’s some measure of fatigue that goes along with that, and I think we all have those days where we wanna tell people to F off. But not all of us have cameras on us all the time.”

Hughes isn’t the only rookie in the cast. Quincy Isaiah, who brings the perfect amount of energy to his role as Magic Johnson, is also making his debut. But the show also has several actors of notable vintage. Oscar winners Adrien Brody and Sally Field play Pat Riley and Jessie Buss, the mother of Lakers owner Jerry, who is portrayed by John C. Reilly in an Emmy-worthy performance.

It’s hard not to watch Reilly’s portrayal of the real estate magnate (who may or may not actually have enough cash to afford the team) and notable Playboy Mansion enthusiast and not think of Boogie Nights. But that’s the vibe the series aims for—Hollywood in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when basketball players were becoming a new kind of star. And that’s what will certainly set Winning Time apart from the Lakers projects—Johnson’s forthcoming Apple TV+ docuseries, and a Hulu doc on the team—that have sprung up in the wake of The Last Dance. Says Hughes, “What [Winning Time] does is it really shows the completeness of all the characters, all of the facets of their lives.”