Ex-Philadelphia Eagle Nnamdi Asomugha turns director with a Tribeca hit

Nnamdi Asomugha had a brief stint with the Philadelphia Eagles, when he arrived as their most-coveted acquisition during a 2011 offseason that saw them prematurely dubbed the “Dream Team.” They’d go on to finish 8-8 and miss the playoffs.

At the end of the 2012 season, Asomugha was released by the team.

In 2013, after a yearlong stint with the 49ers, when Asomugha was considering hanging up his cleats for good, NFL Hall-of-Famer Ronnie Lott had some advice for him: “Whatever you get into next, you have to bring the same level of intensity and the same level of care and dedication that you brought to football.”

The words stayed with him and motivated him to take acting classes in New York and Los Angeles after he moved out of Old City.

In his dreamlik second career, he is one of Hollywood’s fastest-rising stars.

He’s acted alongside Bruce Willis, Rosario Dawson, LaKeith Stanfield, Jessica Chastain, and Eddie Redmayne. Founded his own production company. And married Django Unchained star Kerry Washington.

His latest film, The Knife, premiered Sunday at New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival, and marked a strong directorial debut for Asomugha, who also cowrote, starred in, and produced the 82-minute drama.

“Anytime that you get into the festival world, there’s an excitement and an energy about it because people get to see films in their purest form,” Asomugha said from Los Angeles, amid production for the upcoming Apple TV+ limited series The Savant, which sees him teaming up again with Chastain, two years after the pair worked together on the Netflix thriller The Good Nurse.

Asomugha remembers filming commercials during his football days: “Everyone was telling me I was good, and I didn’t know if they were lying or telling the truth, but I just went along with it.”

It turns out they weren’t lying. A few years later, he produced and starred in Amazon Studios’ Crown Heights, which was accepted into the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. The movie would go on to win the Audience Award for U.S. Dramatic Film, and Asomugha was considered one of the biggest breakout actors of the festival.

When cowriter and executive producer Mark Duplass then asked him to join The Knife, the former cornerback didn’t think he’d go on to direct and write the project.

“It was the furthest thing from my mind,” he said. “Acting and producing, I thought, was enough of a challenge.”

Duplass, he said, is one of those rare people in show business who actually wants to collaborate.As they continued talking about the script, Duplass suggested Asomugha write it with him, and then later brought up the idea of him leading the project. It took some convincing from his manager and his close friends, but he ultimately decided to “take a stab at it” (no pun intended).

To prepare himself for the multiple roles, he looked to interviews with other actor-directors and found a nugget of wisdom from Ozark star Jason Bateman. “The best thing about acting and directing is,” the actor said, “that the actor knows what the director wants.”

That’s what Asomugha told himself during the hectic 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. shoots when he didn’t have time to stop and look at what the crew was filming. “It’s a scary thing because you never really know how it’s going.”

The film, a blood-pumping-yet-poignant drama, shows Asomugha as a working-class father of three, who awakens one night to find an intruder in his home and subsequently undergoes an hours-long interrogation with his family at the hands of a nearly all-white police force.

With strong performances from Aja Naomi King and Melissa Leo, in addition to Asomugha, the film is not only well-crafted but also powerful.

“It’s a way for viewers to be a little bit more empathetic to what certain families have to deal with,” Asomugha said.

“Truth is such a big concept for this film,” he added. “The first day of shooting I brought the whole crew together and I said, ‘The goal of this thing is to bring out the truth in every element of this story.’”

Part of getting at that truth included bringing in his older sister, Chisara, who holds a medical degree from Duke and had a pediatric fellowship at Yale, to play the character of EMT #1. She is also a poet and an actor, and Asomugha said it felt great to be able to “combine her two passions” for his project.

Two of the film’s child actors hadn’t acted before, but the filmmaker feels “everyone brought their best.” His only advice to them, he said, was to “just bring the truth out here … then I’ll find the performance in the edit.”

“They went with it and trusted I’d put it together.”

As for his next endeavor, Asomugha says he’s been having fun working on The Savant but wants to get back to something where he has more control.

“I just want it to feel fresh and to always feel new, so I tend to want to go back and forth,” he says of the rotating actor/writer/producer hats he typically wears.

“Now I just wanna do one of my own projects again, so I have to go back to the lab and figure out what that is. There isn’t enough time in the day … I’m trying.”