Mr. Throwback, Media and Acting Moves

Stephen Curry has four NBA championships, two NBA MVP Awards and an Olympic gold medal, but the Golden State Warriors star is now setting his sights on Hollywood.

Curry is currently starring in Mr. Throwback, a comedy on NBCUniversal’s Peacock, and his Unanimous Media has a full slate of projects and concepts in the works meant to turn the athlete into a media mogul, both in front of and behind the camera.

Over lunch in New York, with his gold medal conspicuously sitting next to his plate, Curry and Unanimous CEO Erick Peyton discussed their plans to turn the company into a bona fide entertainment powerhouse, as well as Curry’s desire to get more acting roles, with Peyton noting that the company is developing a “menu” of options for Curry that he can turn to whenever he decides to hang up his Under Armour sneakers on the court.

Unanimous Media has expanded recently. How have you tried to expand the business and grow it to include these bigger, broader genres like scripted comedy?

Curry: It’s cool to see the evolution of what Unanimous is capable of, from its inception to now. Obviously most of the content has been centered around me for a very long time, and being able to open up doors through TV, film and podcasting, publishing, you name it. Where the long-term sustainability of this is, is other content, other stories, other opportunities that don’t involve me, but the timing of Mr. Throwback and my acting debut — which is extremely fun and hopefully not the last time I get to do it — to the books, from our publishing arm to the podcast I did with my dad, Heat Check, we’re starting to create these avenues for other stories.

I feel like it’s kind of followed my lead on that front. Being able to pass the baton to different target audiences, different mediums, that will be the 10-to-20-year roadmap for what Unanimous is capable of and doing at a very high level. I think Mr. Throwback hit a goldmine with the timing obviously [launched with the Paris Olympics], and it was such a fast production, an unbelievable experience, and then we got to package it all right before the gold medal game. So hopefully there’s a lot more to come there.

You mentioned that you want to do other acting gigs. You have a limited time frame given the NBA schedule right now, but is that something you could see yourself doing more of over time?

Curry: For sure, and people love that answer, because it wasn’t always the case. It wasn’t the case because I didn’t want to half-ass anything. You don’t want to just not be prepared, not be polished and come with the right approach to it. I’ve done commercial shoots and been on sets and done it all to get reps, but [Mr. Throwback] was the right story, it was the right cast, all the ingredients were there, and I had a window of time that I could actually do it.

It was obviously an amazingly fun experience. If I’m not playing myself and doing something different, then that’s a different venture, and trying to get reps and make sure I present my best self in that front, I’m not going to do anything just to do it. I got a little bit of training at home. My wife [Ayesha Curry], she’s been an actress for the longest time. She did a movie last year with Lindsay Lohan [Netflix’s Irish Wish]. She was encouraging me to go on this journey, so when I’m done playing I’m hoping that there’s more opportunities to kind of expand there in front of the camera.

What has been the biggest adjustment for you coming to it from the athlete’s perspective? Because everyone knows who you are, and you’ve got this public profile, but it’s a very different business.

Curry: First, you’ve got to get the people that you work with right. Insofar as that and the shared mindset of how you’re going to do business and represent you in the room. [Erick Peyton’s] job, and he says it a lot, is that you’ve got to keep the main thing the main thing this whole time. It’s tough to do that because we’re doing so much, from me and my wife’s foundation to Unanimous, to trying to build Curry Brand, there’s a lot going on in different parts of the year, but everybody’s allowed my input and influence to give direction, and then you go execute the plan, and then I’m in charge of putting the ball in the basket, so that the platform can continue to grow.

It’s allowed me to kind of grow at a steady pace while I’m still playing so that the foundations are there in the places that I know I want to be a part of in the post-career landscape for me. Legacy, impact, it all matters. I wanted to take some swings at the plate while I’m still going. You see what Michael [Jordan]’s done, you see what Bron [LeBron James] has done, you see other guys who stayed true to who they are and their personalities and where they want to do it, but have been pretty active while they were playing. That gave me a little confidence that you can do it yourself.

What other mediums, like film, are you looking to expand into?

Curry: All of them, appropriately, though, right?  We have some projects in the works with animation.

Peyton: We have a lot of docs, we did a little bit of gaming, Fortnite. It’s all about having vehicles to inspire and vehicles to pathways for diverse storytelling and the stories that we want to amplify. So I think that for us, because we are a younger production company, and we had to go through the strike and the volatility in the media industry. What we saw with that is like, okay, we can get through that, and we can actually be elevated and still produce content at a high level.

Curry: There’s going to be a lot of complementary elements, like you want to be able to have something like a podcast and then support a book, which can turn to TV. You want to have those types of opportunities that can cross a lot of different mediums. We have a pretty good sweet spot in the TV space, getting the most swings at the plate at that. You want to have a plan, but you want to reflect, to know where the market’s going to be.

Peyton: The final vertical for Unanimous is live programming. So we have a couple things that we are shopping now. We have one massive format that’s with the creators of American Ninja Warrior, [A. Smith & Co.] and it’s a golf thing, it’s golf on steroids, and hopefully it’ll be around for many years.

Would you do an altcast [like ESPN’s Manningcast or The Shop]?

Peyton: Yeah. I mean, I was looking at this thing, it’s not popular here, I think it’s in Brazil, but it’s actually like you’re living the experience with the fan, but you’re not in the environment. Watching people watch something. So yes, we will ultimately develop an altcast, but we want to explore doing it differently, where it’s more like you’re celebrating when they’re celebrating. It’s almost like FaceTiming your best friend when something happens.

With Mr. Throwback, were you inspired by any particular TV shows, any other mockumentary style shows?

Curry: Talking to [Daniel and Matthew Libman and David Caspe], the showrunners, all the inspiration they brought, I got to see obviously the Happy Endings thing [created by the same team], but also Parks and Rec and The Office, that format, but then trying to bring it within this story, I could see the vision clearly for this being my first experience. Like, I could kind of see the flavor of what we were trying to do, and their experience of executing it. And from the time that we worked on the pilot script to the sizzle, we felt like the chemistry was crazy.

And so when we got Adam [Pally], we got Ego [Nwodim], and obviously her skill set with SNL and all the other things she’s done. It was exactly what I expected and thankful to get some great reviews and people seem to seem to enjoy it. There’s hopefully a lot of different ways we can take it now for season two, three and beyond, but taking the mockumentary style, there’s a fine line between it being forced and kind of corny and cheesy to bringing it into my world, like, you know, the glitz and glam what it is, and making the jokes land and real and giving them space. And so I think we did a pretty good job.

What has the experience been like working with NBC on the show?

Peyton: I mean, NBC has been amazing. Mr. Throwback was a bidding war. I think it’s public knowledge, maybe not. Obviously deciding to go with the home team — that’s where our [development] deal is at — was an easy enough decision. But once you saw them roll out the Olympics, and you saw the platform, you’re like, oh crap, they’re doing it.

I think more than most, they’re relying on sports. And so it kind of makes sense that your show would kind of benefit from that, coming out of the Olympics.

Peyton: I don’t know if you saw this, but Stephen on the gold medal stand mimics a scene from Mr. Throwback to shout out [Adam] Pally. Nobody caught it but Pally, he texted us on the side. That’s the awareness that he has around these types of things, he really, really supports it.

What’s it been like for you in terms of making sure executives and whomever you guys meet with are taking [Stephen] seriously?

Peyton: I will be 100 percent honest. You’ve gotta prove it out. It’s important for him to meet with our partners, because there’s a ton of cynicism in our industry. And we are a company that is extremely optimistic, probably to a fault, because it’s all drafting up from him, and he is exactly who he is, nice, genuine, joyful.

For Throwback, you know, he had a baby, so that shit was pushed, [and we had to be] telling a studio who’s already shooting the other stuff in Chicago, we don’t know when we’re shooting. That’s where the trust, that’s where these meetings come into play. You met him, you know what he’s like, we’re gonna get dates, he has to take care of the family first.

I always tell the executives, when he shows up, it’ll be fine, because they’ve been burned before. My job is a lot of things, but I think that’s probably one of the most important, making sure people understand that if we committed to it, we’ll be there.