Terry Crews, actor, former NFL player, and host of Netflix’s “Ultimate Beastmaster“, explains how his football career both helped and hurt him in preparing for the entertainment industry. Following is a transcript of the video.

For me, football, it helped and hurt in a lot of ways. The NFL kind of set me up with a – I had a sense of entitlement. You’re a football player, everyone loves you, everyone says you are the man, you are part of this whole cult of masculinity, you’re like, “I got it all.” And then all of a sudden, that whole promise gets yanked out from under you. Because everybody, you know, no matter what time in your life you are, you have to quit playing your sports, and then there is the transition, and this is something that only people who’ve been through it can talk about. It’s a transition – was extremely hard, in that you are not who you think you are. Because, you are known as an athlete, you are known as this and you are known as that, and then all of a sudden, you have to rebuild your life. It’s very, very intense. People who have been in your college with you have gone on to relative success while you are starting over. And it’s very strange, it’s very foreign. But the good thing about football is that you develop a work ethic if you work at it, if you try. And you start to learn that anything can be learned, anything can be, you know, as long as you keep doing it, you can get it. I have to say, it’s kind of weird because I look at entertainment and my football career, the ups and downs, the ins and outs to how hard it was, it really prepared me for entertainment, in that, I could take rejection, I could go to an audition and realise that it wasn’t about me and just realise it was about the piece, or realise it was about, you know, you go on a set and you realise who’s the star, who’s the coach, who’s the director, who’s the day player, who’s the backup. This kind of thing, and it allows you to understand the system of authority in that kind of thing, but it helped and hurt in two different ways, and I have to say, for me, because of a mindset change, it actually ended up helping more than it hurt me.

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