Sanaa Lathan is opening up about her “miserable” experience filming Love & Basketball.
The 47-year-old actress starred in the 2000 flick about aspiring basketball players falling in love on their journey to stardom.
“The hardest challenge was getting the job…I had a dance background, but I had never picked up a basketball. [Director] Gina [Prince-Bythewood] and the producers really wanted a basketball player that could act as opposed to an actress they could teach to play basketball,” Sanaa told CBS.
After many auditions against basketball players who had been given acting coaches, Sanaa demanded a basketball coach, with whom she trained with for fives hours a day before getting the part.
She continued, “I was miserable. I can laugh about it now. I got the job and I think Gina finally got to the point where she had to hire somebody. It’s almost like she hired me because she couldn’t find somebody else. There wasn’t a lot of joy and there wasn’t a lot of trust in me. It was her baby and it was her first time directing. It was a big deal for her and nobody knows me then really. She gets to the point where she makes this decision with me, but I felt like the default.”
Sanaa added that once they were filming, she had to act alongside real ballplayers, which led to ” a lot of crying behind the scenes.”
Check out all that Sanaa had to say about the experience…
