Kyrie Irving's alter ego “Uncle Drew” recently hit the big screen, but the Boston Celtics guard didn't always believe that the commercial character would work as a movie.
Uncle Drew famously began as a Pepsi Max internet commercial where Irving went undercover as an old man at a basketball court. He began playing pickup and to everyone's surprise, started embarrassing his opponents. The groans when Uncle Drew touched the ball quickly turned to cheers after he knocked down a couple threes and broke the ankles of any defender that tried him. The character grew in popularity, so much so that it made sense to make a movie about him, despite Irving's skepticism.
“I wasn’t on board with it at first when they approached me. I was like, ‘You guys aren’t going to make a movie about a YouTube older man,’ ” he told Gary Washburn of the Boston Globe. “When the studios approached me, it just evolved from Internet. It was the first time ever that an Internet kind of short had turned into a movie. It was a great role to be in at that time.”
“Uncle Drew” hit the big screen with tons of star power. In addition to Kyrie, the cast included Lil Rel Howery, Shaquille O'Neal, Chris Webber, Reggie Miller, Lisa Leslie, Nate Robinson, Mike Epps, Tiffany Haddish, Nick Kroll, and Aaron Gordon.
The film made $44.3 million at the box office and received mixed reviews, but they tended to be slightly more positive than negative. That's not bad for a character that started as an internet commercial.
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