Media obligations can be a chore for Marshawn Lynch, who once deflected more than two dozen questions during a Super Bowl news conference with variations of the response “I’m just here so I won’t get fined.”
A decade later, after completing about 30 interviews across five hours to promote Season 3 of HBO’s “Euphoria,” he was slouched on a couch in an upscale Beverly Hills hotel, wearing a sky-blue sweatsuit and pausing the hip-hop music that blared from his phone. Asked if he quickly ran through the interviews, Lynch responded, “Hell yeah.”
The bright lights of Hollywood are a surprising choice for an athlete known for avoiding journalists as effectively as he ran through opponents. But since retiring from the N.F.L. in 2020 after 12 seasons, Lynch has acted in the HBO sci-fi series “Westworld” and the queer sex comedy “Bottoms.” His teammates now are Zendaya and Sydney Sweeney.
In the newest season of “Euphoria,” a drug-and-sex-filled fantasia returning after a four-year hiatus, Lynch is the henchman of a strip-club owner played by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. The actors bonded over Isaac Hayes music in a dressing trailer, and Akinnuoye-Agbaje praised their chemistry during an improvised scene with Sweeney.
“He has this natural charisma,” Akinnuoye-Agbaje said. “It’s like an innate confidence, a sense of self, and he oozes that.”
In an industry that rewards polish, control and tight messaging, Lynch, 39, refuses to conform. He can cite a biblical proverb and unleash a string of expletives in the same breath. While playing college football at the University of California, he took a medical cart for a joyride across the field; in the N.F.L., he would eat Skittles on the sideline.
The eccentricities have served Lynch well in his post-football career. He compares his popularity to “the dope game,” a slang term for buying and selling drugs.
“You got product, they gonna buy product,” Lynch said, using a crude word that would fit right in the HBO shows he has appeared in.
Lynch stares down from digital billboards for a sports-gambling company and grooming products. He hosts an intermittent podcast with Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and is a professional wanderer for Amazon Prime Video, traveling to cities to record content for N.F.L. broadcasts. He has played himself in the movie “80 for Brady” and television series like “The League” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.”
The “Euphoria” casting, though, is the most high-profile test into whether the athlete known as Beast Mode can win over new audiences with his raw personality.
“You know what you’re going to get with me,” Lynch, a native of Oakland, Calif., said in his thick, raspy accent. “Straight shooter.”
Richard Sherman said that when he was Lynch’s teammate on the Seattle Seahawks, there was no indication he would pursue an entertainment career. “We thought he was going to buy up the whole city of Oakland and hide away in Hawaii,” Sherman said.
The casting director of “Euphoria,” Mary Vernieu, had previously worked with Lynch on the 2025 action-comedy movie “The Pickup,” in which he portrays a money launderer and car mechanic. She said she envisioned Lynch for the “Euphoria” role as soon as she read the Season 3 script.
In the new season’s first episode, he briefly directs Zendaya’s character, Rue, to the bathroom and is then seen playing Marco Polo with topless women while wearing arm floaties in a pool.
“He was so right for the world,” Vernieu said. She added, “He can seamlessly go from edgy to scary to funny.”
It once was relatively common for star football players to move into acting, including Jim Brown (“The Dirty Dozen”), Alex Karras (“Blazing Saddles”), O.J. Simpson (“The Naked Gun”) and Merlin Olsen (“Little House on the Prairie”). Vernieu said that she loosely monitored the football landscape and that Lynch’s persona caught her eye.
“He’s got the thing that makes people want to pay attention,” she said. “He has a very good spirit, and you can feel that.”
As Lynch neared retirement, he started an entertainment company called Beast Mode Productions. “I knew I wasn’t going to go sit at no desk,” he said.
He initially did not want to act, but his agents advised him that on-camera roles could prop up his business and create jobs. So he jokingly outlined his preferences: characters with little dialogue who would shoot people and blow them up. One of his first substantial gigs came as the underground criminal Giggles in “Westworld.”
Accustomed to the regimented schedules of sports teams, Lynch learned a lot about Hollywood while waiting in his trailer for at least 14 hours before one of his scenes was postponed to another day. The man who shrugged off eight opponents in one of the most famous runs in N.F.L. history said his second career was more mental than physical.
“Every job is something new,” he said. “I’m getting to test myself in ways that I’ve never done before.”
A busy week of promotional work surrounding this year’s Super Bowl included events for his charitable foundation, a Nike commercial shoot and a panel discussion about community activism. He also taped an episode of “Da Get Got Pod,” a podcast Lynch hosts with his former teammate Michael Robinson, while wearing sunglasses and a balaclava mask. In a two-story venue packed with fans, Lynch and Robinson reminisced on their playing careers while they interviewed the comedian Godfrey.
Lynch, who also played for the Buffalo Bills and the Oakland Raiders, was not always open during his athletic career. When reporters would enter the locker room after practice, Sherman said, Lynch would sometimes play music loudly or avoid them altogether. Lynch said the sports news conferences were sometimes uninteresting.
“It was just me talking, like, ‘Oh yeah, we gonna run the ball, or we gonna throw the ball,’” Lynch said.
When he did speak, it was to people he trusted. Robinson said that the night of Lynch’s infamous Super Bowl news conference, he saw Lynch complete about 25 phone interviews with outlets he preferred in the back of a Sprinter van.
“That’s when it hit me, like, ‘He understands the power of his voice,’” Robinson said.
As he leaned on the bar of a waterfront San Francisco steakhouse, music blaring downstairs, Lynch said he had no agenda for his second career. He was focused on choosing engagements he would enjoy.
“I’m really a big-ass kid at heart, and I just love to have hella fun,” Lynch said
Emmanuel Morgan reports on sports, pop culture and entertainment.
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