School drop-off was probably the last place Jay Ellis expected to land a role. The actor was walking out of his daughter’s classroom after getting her situated when he spotted Mindy Kaling coming down the hallway.
“She goes, ‘are you going to be my coach or what? Are you going to be my coach, Jay? Tell me now,’” Ellis recalls. “And I was like, ‘yeah, Mindy, I want to do it. I love you. You’re the funniest person in the world.’ That was my way in. I’ve never gotten a job at school drop-off before this.”
Netflix can thank a well-timed school run-in then for bringing Ellis to “Running Point,” the new Kaling-produced series on Netflix starring Kate Hudson as a Jeanie Buss-inspired owner of a Los Angeles professional basketball team. After premiering at the end of February, the series was just renewed for a second season.
The project is the first of two that Ellis has coming this spring: on April 4 he’ll be seen in the Lionsgate movie “Freaky Tales,” which opened the Sundance Film Festival in 2024 and caused so much buzz that hundreds of ticket holders were turned away at the door.
Jay Ellis
Ryan Williams/WWD
The roles are a step into the next stage of Ellis’ career. The 43-year-old became a breakout star with his role as Lawrence in “Insecure,” which ran from 2016 to 2021, and since then has been seen in “Top Gun: Maverick” and Dave Franco’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.” A former basketball player himself, Ellis can’t help but be drawn to sports roles — yet “Running Point” sees him making the shift from portraying a player to now a coach, and “Freaky Tales” required intense martial arts training.
“I love action and I get called for a thing, and it is not action,” Ellis says, alluding to the many heartthrob roles he’s done. While “Freaky Tales” was where he leaned into action, “Running Point” was his moment to say goodbye to basketball in his career. He plays the team’s coach, tapping directly into his basketball history, which included playing in college and interning for the Portland Trailblazers.
“I will say, I think I pissed off our entire crew because when we were removing cameras, I was always playing basketball. So I’m sweating, my makeup is dripping, I have pit stains on my shirt, I’ve kicked my shoes off and they’ve got scuff marks all over them. I split my pants at one point,” Ellis says. “But ‘Running Point’ is interesting because it also in some ways is letting me close my own chapter on basketball. I remember the first time when I heard it was the coach role I remember going, ‘damn, I’m a coach now. OK. I guess I’m there now.’ I’ll still try to be out there, but it definitely is a fun thing to let that sun set and a new sun will rise.”
Jay Ellis
Ryan Williams/WWD
His character in “Freaky Tales” — an adventure comedy set in 1980s Oakland following a real-life cast of characters whose storylines all cross in strange ways — is also an NBA player, though it was the physical action part of the role that intrigued Ellis. Luckily, his “Top Gun” costar Tom Cruise was just a text away.
“I called him and I was like, ‘Hey, man, this is what we’re supposed to do. Do you have any ideas of what I should be doing or how I should attack this?’ And he sent me this text message that if you printed it, it would probably be three pages long,’” Ellis says. “And so it was great though because he really talked about the training aspect of it, but really how you apply that to filming it.”
He trained in martial arts for five weeks before shooting began, even flying himself out to Oakland as much as he could to work with the stunt team.
Jay Ellis
Ryan Williams/WWD
“It was a small budget, so we didn’t really have it in the schedule for me to be there the whole time. And I was like, ‘Film lasts forever. Y’all not going to have me out here looking crazy. No, thank you,’” he says. “But it was a challenge. I really go to push myself and be like, ‘oh yeah, I’m really f–king good at this. I can do this.’ And I’m very excited to go do this, and I’m going to go show people — I’m going to show myself more importantly — that I can do this and have a really good time with it, and hopefully create a character that will stand the test of time and that people will fall in love with just like they have some of these other action characters.”
Ahead, Ellis plans to keep expanding into new challenges, basketball aside — although he’s having a bit of a hard time fully letting go.
“I’m trying to do a doc on Patrick Ewing right now. I’ve been chasing him for two or three years to do this documentary, and I think we’re meeting again next week. My team is like, ‘No more basketball,’” he says.
