Kevin Durant Goes Hollywood With “Thunderstruck”

Add actor to Kevin Durant‘s expanding resume. Durant brought Hollywood to Oklahoma City to film “Thunderstruck”, a basketball based movie aimed at children that centers on Durant and the Oklahoma City Thunder. The plot sounds very similar to the movie “Like Mike.”

According to Warner Brothers:

“A fun and energetic family basketball movie starring Kevin Durant AS HIMSELF, a basketball star who switches talent with a klutzy 16 year old fan. When Brian, a hopelessly uncoordinated young fan magically switches talents with his hero, Kevin Durant, he becomes the star of his high school team…while Kevin Durant suddenly can’t make a shot to save his life. But with the playoffs approaching, Brian learns that being a true winner involves working hard at your own game, and he tries to make things right in time to prevent a catastrophic end to his hero’s season.”

This clip was released during All-Star Weekend at a promotional event that our own Sean Sweeney attended. It featured the producers, and Durant with a few of his fellow co-stars in the movie taking questions. Taylor Gray, the actor playing the teenager who switches talents with Durant, said he prepared for the movie by watching every YouTube clip he could find of the OKC star.

Surprisingly, KD said his movie wasn’t a lot like “Space Jam,” even though he admitted, “Everybody wants to be like Mike a little bit.”

But the one thing everyone in attendance wanted to know was just how good of an actor is Durant? Well he was good enough that after the first day, the film’s producer, Mike Karz, went back into the script and added two new scenes for him.

In a recent piece on ESPN, director John Whitesell also talked about Durant’s acting skills:

“Asked by director John Whitesell to shoot clumsily and brick several jumpers in a row, Durant repeatedly drained baskets by accident while filming the basketball scenes in Oklahoma City.

“We’ve got the camera rolling and he misses the first one,” Whitesell said, “and then he misses the second one, and then all of a sudden there’d be a swish and he would turn to me and say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll miss next time.'”

…

“There’s a lot of improv stuff,” said Whitesell, who kept Durant for about 12 hours on their biggest shooting day. “There’s a whole conversation with Brandon that they just created on set, and a whole scene with Jim Belushi where they improved the dialogue, going back and forth, and Kevin really held his own with Jim. So he was quite impressive.”

Durant having difficulty purposely missing jumpers is nothing new. This is the two-time winner of the now defunct All-Star H.O.R.S.E. competition we are talking about, but Durant having to apologize for making jumpers, something he has trained to do, is just great comedy. It’s also good to hear that Durant was able to go back and forth with Jim Belushi without any problems; with the playoffs only a month away Durant will need definitely this thinking on his toes experience to bring the Thunder to the Finals. I really hope Durant cites his experience on the set of Thunderstruck in post game interviews after big playoff wins. Not only would it be great marketing for the movie, it would also make Jim Belushi relevant again.

Is this the beginning of Durant’s acting career? We will just have to wait to see as there is no release date just yet, expect the movie to reach theaters (or maybe straight to DVD) in the coming months.