Loren Woods was an NBA center, and then he got ‘Spirited’ away into Hollywood

Loren Woods didn’t discover acting until he was in college. By then, it was too late.

He was already 7 foot 1, sturdy but athletic. Not only did he have size, but he also had talent — enough to start for a premier college basketball program.

Woods’ path was almost preordained. In high school, he became a fan of the stage and the performing arts — theater, television, film — but he also sprouted into one of the top basketball recruits in his class. After two underwhelming years at Wake Forest, he transferred to Arizona and found his footing at a national powerhouse.

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Still, Woods sought out his other passion and explored its depths. He learned about Shakespeare and Molière, two of the world’s greatest playwrights. He took an introductory acting class and modern dance at Arizona. He loved it.

His teacher offered high praise. If Woods wanted to be an actor, to truly pursue the craft, he remembers the professor saying, he could make it.

“OK, that’s very nice,” Woods, now 44, recalled to The Athletic. “I appreciate the compliment, but I am 7 feet tall, and I am going to the NBA.”

Woods didn’t need to look for a job in the entertainment industry; he had a job waiting for him.

That lasted for a while too. Woods did make the NBA as a second-round selection and then stuck around for six seasons. A few years in Europe followed. It wasn’t an extravagant career, but it was successful because making the league is hard enough. Booking a role isn’t easy, but neither is sticking around as the 46th overall pick.

A few years ago, though, Woods’ acting ambitions were rekindled. He not only was ready for his close-up, but he also wanted it.

In December, right at the heart of the Christmas season, he finally got his break. In a movie starring Will Ferrell, Ryan Reynolds and Octavia Spencer, Loren Woods was on the same call sheet, the same IMDB page; he was the first person viewers saw when “Spirited” came on their screens, finally making his dream — dormant for decades — come true.

“There’s never going to be anybody in the NBA that when they turn 43 and they’d never played before and they were just playing at the YMCA for a few years,” he said, explaining how inexplicable his career change feels compared to basketball. “And then they just get to be on the same court as LeBron and Steph Curry. It doesn’t happen, right? It’s almost hard to believe because I come from a world (where) that would never happen.”

A pinch of semantics: Woods is the first person viewers see when “Spirited” begins … but they don’t see him.

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When a tall, hooded figure steps out in the movie’s opening scene, his face remains hidden. Woods isn’t seen in the entire movie. He’s never heard from, either. “Spirited” is a rendition of “A Christmas Carol,” that old Charles Dickens tale, and Woods plays the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come.

He points, he augurs, he even dances. But he never talks. the ghost has a voice, but it’s comedian Tracy Morgan’s. In his Hollywood debut, Woods not only has to play someone else, but he doesn’t even get to sound like himself.

It was the perfect role. The one he wanted as he settled into his new career. He all but asked for it when he talked to his agent a few months before he knew it even existed.

“Is there anything that’s coming up that’s just a funny monster?” Woods said, recounting their conversation. “I could dress up. I could be like a monster. Let me be funny. Let me be goofy. Let me be my natural self. Let me do it.”

For decades, Woods didn’t know this was what he wanted. He was a second-round pick in 2001 after leading Arizona to the Final Four. He scored 22 points and grabbed 11 rebounds in his final collegiate outing, the national title game against Duke. He had stints in the NBA with the Timberwolves, Heat, Raptors and Rockets and also played nearly a decade abroad, from Spain to Bahrain.

But by 2019, he had settled into a quiet life in Phoenix. He coached a high school basketball team. He had a middle school AAU team. He ran a basketball academy before COVID-19 struck. He owned a marketing site representing clients in Europe.

Then a friend from Los Angeles reached out. There was a new TV show about to start production. It needed a tall Black man.

Woods demurred. He didn’t act, he said. That didn’t matter, his friend countered; he looked the part.

Woods trained for more than three months. He had auditioned for this job before. At Arizona, a prominent scouting website once compared him to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. This time, he was trying out to play Kareem in “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.” He didn’t get this role, either. Still, the producer liked Woods enough to give him a spot in the pilot.

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“Four years ago, that would have been a stretch for me to try to portray that character,” Woods said. “I’m nothing like that character or Kareem as a person. I would had to have really acted at that time, and I didn’t have the chops back then. But it just rekindled an old fire that was already within me.”

Woods set out to make a new life in Hollywood — or at least try. He regularly flew and drove between Phoenix and Los Angeles — a nearly six-hour drive — for the next two years. He started taking acting classes again, rotating between schools every six months.

When Woods was preparing for the NBA Draft, more than two decades ago, he had hardly been stressed. He realized by 19 that he would make the league as long as he didn’t get hurt or do anything stupid. He had the training and the experience. Acting, however, made him self-conscious. He strived for perfection while knowing it was unattainable. He felt rejection after auditions.

Eventually, he stepped into Lesly Kahn’s acting class in Los Angeles. Before meeting her, Woods already had studied method acting — a style that dates back to the early 20th century and asks actors to immerse themselves emotionally into a role — and for a month, he studied Kahn’s version, which teaches students to be able to prepare for a part in hours instead of weeks. For Woods, who had to reheat this career after decades stuck in another one, it felt appropriate.

Kahn found a protégé willing to learn, someone already trained by his decades in professional sports. Athletes, Kahn believes, are unbothered by the vanity that accompanies most actors; they approach life more cogently. If an athlete wants to do something, she said, they’ll do it, believing enough hard work will pay off as it did for them in their sport.

“They don’t seem to have that thing the rest of us normals have: fear and insecurity and vulnerability about it,” Kahn said. “We actors have a sort of a lack of rationality, a lack of logic, and we are just so emotionally focused and emotionally drawn that we don’t have the sense God gave a cockroach.”

Kahn said she rarely refers her students to an agent, but she told Jayson Kinslow, the owner of the MMV Talent Agency, about Woods. Kinslow works with ex-basketball players; he knew of potential roles for them but didn’t always have the clients to fill them.

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A few months after they met, Kinslow called Woods with news of an audition for “Spirited.” The role was unique, as was the casting process. The role needed someone taller than 6 foot 8. Casting director Rachel Tenner auditioned roughly 40 actors.

In his first audition, Woods read the lines for the ghost. He got a call back from Tenner; she told him Morgan might voice the part and wondered if he could audition again, but as Morgan.

Woods needed to embody Morgan as much as the character. He watched several of Morgan’s stand-up sets and past shows to lock down his movements and cadence. He mimicked his friends and his parents over the years, and he talked like Morgan for days ahead of the second tryout.

When Woods got another callback, the director asked if he could dance. Woods didn’t even know “Spirited” was a musical. He told him he could.

“I have rhythm. I can do the basic two-step,” Woods said.

He played Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough” and danced for about 45 seconds. This was all by Zoom. He had little feedback.

Two days later, Kinslow called while Woods was in Phoenix, running practice. Kinslow told Woods, who was in the gym, that he got the part.

“I was always in the gym,” he said. “That’s my happy place.”

Woods was star-struck when he arrived on set in Boston, but he settled in. Ferrell, he said, made him feel as if he belonged. He knew who Woods was — Ferrell is a big Lakers and college basketball fan — and they talked about the sport, finding a common language. Still, Woods was careful. He watched how Ferrell, Reynolds and Spencer moved, how they reacted to their mistakes and whether they picked up their own food.

In the movie, Yet To Come is a large physical presence. At times he is funny, and at others, imposing. He has to dance. All while wearing a large black kaftan and hood.

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The film didn’t want to use special effects, Tenner said, so Woods had to hit all the marks. Tenner called his part a “challenging endeavor.”

It was a rare job, especially for a first-time actor.

“I tell him this doesn’t happen,” Kinslow said. “It’s a unicorn experience. … He got drafted out of high school. That’s the best way I can explain it.”

Woods finally feels he is a performer now, the one his mom tells him he always wanted to be as a child. He just wishes he could have known earlier.

Today, Woods considers himself an actor. Over the last few months, he has been auditioning. He worries his height could make it challenging to land parts and fit on the screen with smaller actors, no matter how good he is, so he’s started writing too, trying to create the right role for himself. He may be 7 feet tall and have 215 games in the NBA on his résumé, but he’s not waiting around anymore for his new career to take off.

“I can honestly compare it to when I got drafted in the NBA,” Woods said. “It’s a dream come true. I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve been very blessed to not only have one thing that I’m super passionate about, that I’ve been able to do in my life — I’ve been able to do two things now that I’m super passionate about.

“Everybody’s not even lucky enough to find the one thing that gets them up every single morning, and for me, I’ve been able to do two things now that I’ve always loved.”

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photo: Ron Turenne, Cindy Ord / Getty Images)