The first season of “Swagger,” a sports drama set in the high-stakes world of high school basketball in the suburb of Seat Pleasant, Md. The creator, Reggie Rock Bythewood, and his cast and crew were proud of what they had accomplished.
But for the show’s second season, which premiered last week on Apple TV+, Bythewood’s ambitions were much bigger. He wanted the story to be more complex. He wanted basketball to be more exciting. And he wanted to use the story of a school sports team to make a statement about the country.
“There’s that athlete mentality that wants to be challenged,” Bythewood said in a recent video interview. He phrased the challenge this way: “How do you take Season 2 of ‘Swagger’ and hold up a mirror to America?”
The series centers on Jace Carson (Isaiah Hill), a top high school athlete who ranks among the best basketball players in his area and is expected to earn a college basketball scholarship and eventually a spot in the NBA. first season, Jace clashed with those around him as well as his single mother, Jenna (Shinelle Azoroh); his lifelong best friend, Crystal (Quvenzhané Wallis); and his demanding but supportive coach, Ike (O’Shea Jackson Jr.). The second season jumps forward to Jace’s senior year as the demands of burgeoning fame and the pressures of rising expectations become feverish.
Carson is loosely based on Kevin Durant, the Phoenix Suns power forward and multiple NBA champion, All-Star and MVP who has been one of the league’s top players throughout his 16-year career. While “Swagger” is set in the present day – Durant attended high school in the early 2000s – much of Carson’s biography is inspired by Durant’s, including his upbringing by a single mother and a top candidate who came from Seat Pleasant. .
The concept of a show based on Durant’s life originated with the man himself along with Rich Kleiman, his manager and business partner. “Rich Kleiman and I had been thinking for a while about doing something that was based on my earlier years and focused on the world of AAU basketball,” Durant wrote in an email. “We are in contact with [the producer] Brian Grazer a few years ago.
When Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment first approached Bythewood with the pitch, “It didn’t really sound like something I wanted to do,” Bythewood admitted. But at the time, Durant was still playing for the Golden State Warriors, based in the Bay Area, and Bythewood, in Los Angeles, thought it wouldn’t hurt to get on a plane and have a meeting.
“I met the man and talked to him about his life, and I found my own emotional connections to his story,” he said.
Bythewood first developed an interest in acting as a high school student in the Bronx – in his senior year, he landed a role on the NBC soap opera “Another World”. His soap opera stardom offered a glimpse into the pressures that a star athlete could rise to the spotlight from the middle of Seat Pleasant.
“It was this idea of being an environment where suddenly all eyes are on you,” he said. “I was really dealing with the plight, the joy, the challenges, everything.” Bythewood added his own perspective to Durant’s story, and “Swagger” was born from there.
The show’s contemporary setting has allowed it to address modern political issues. In the first season, the characters dealt with Covid protocols and participated in Black Lives Matter protests; this season, Bythewood wanted to touch on “the shift in the country” away from the “reckoning with racism and people wanting to re-examine themselves” that emerged from the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, he said, “critical race theory is seen as one of the country’s greatest enemies.”
He used the season’s predominantly white prep school environment as a microcosm of the nation, portraying power relations and the unique hardships faced by the black students.
Bythewood’s star in “Swagger” has always been authenticity, he said. Given the serious nature of the off-court subject matter — which also touches on a wide variety of social issues, including sexual assault, violence and homophobia — he wanted to make sure the sports action was as compelling as the drama.
“When you’re doing something this heavy, basketball has to be dope,” he said. “You can’t tell the truth about society and then lie about basketball.”
From the start, Bythewood has refused to cheat or compromise when shooting the game sequences in ‘Swagger’. In fact, when one dunks, he dunks on a regulation hoop; they don’t lower the rim or make the actor jump on a trampoline. Season 2 features even more high-level athletic field action. “You’ll never see anyone on our show shoot the ball and then we cut to the ball that goes through the rim,” Bythewood said.
That commitment to realism took a toll on the cast, which mixes veteran actors with amateurs from basketball backgrounds. The actors had to learn to play convincing ball and the ballers had to give convincing performances.
Wallis, the youngest Oscar nominee in history for Best Actress (for “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” in 2012), said in a recent interview that she “didn’t really play basketball before working on this show” and couldn’t do much more than dribbling the ball. Her role as a top female basketball player with hopes of becoming a McDonald’s All American required Wallis to spend months “training intensely, always in the gym, training with the boys, training alone, playing free game, playing for realsies”. said.
Jackson said that although he had grown up playing basketball and remained a devoted NBA fan, he still underwent considerable training to “sharpen my tools a bit and get my grips right”. As a coach, his character isn’t asked to play as much full-on basketball as some of the younger players. But his skills were still put to the test on a regular basis, as in a strikingly long shot from the season 2 premiere — shot without the aid of invisible montages or CGI — in which Ike and Jace have a heart-to-heart as they shoot free throws and make each.
“Reggie was like, ‘Please, make it work,'” Jackson said. “I’m like, ‘Reggie, we got your man.'”
For Hill, who had a basketball background and had never acted before being cast as the star of “Swagger,” the test was reversed: dunking came more naturally to him than dramatic monologues. He said in a recent interview that seeing the other cast members “work super hard to give it their all on the basketball court” had kept him motivated to work hard on his acting.
“Some of them didn’t know how to dribble for three weeks before shooting, and in Season 2 they’re doing reverse layups and Euro steps,” he said. “Seeing them raise the stakes on the field every day made me want to raise the stakes on the acting side.”
Bythewood noticed the trouble. “Isaiah did a great job in Season 1,” he said. “But at the end of Season 2, he’s no longer a basketball player who can act: he’s an actor who just happens to play basketball. The level of growth he has shown is exciting.”
Durant is also impressed with the progress of the series.
“It’s cool to see how the relationships between the characters have evolved so much in seasons 1 and 2,” he said. “The story has taken on a life of its own. I can certainly still see a little bit of myself in Jace, but his character is definitely his own person going through his own challenges in today’s world.