Everyone who’s used to seeing Wayne Brady as a goofy comedian on Who’s Line Is It Anyway or his talk show won’t be getting any laughs out of him in Crossover. He plays the shrewd businessman Vaughn, who manipulates players in his underground basketball circuit to serve his own purposes. The dramatic character was a nice change of pace for Brady.
Wayne Brady Talks Crossover
“It’s nice pressure to not have to deliver that but then the pressure is almost double on the other end,” Brady said. “You don’t want to suck doing a dramatic piece because then you don’t want anyone to go, ‘Ah, see. He couldn’t do it.’ So I’m feeling the other pressure and I just hope, this isn’t going to win any awards but at the end of the day I just want folks leaving the movie going, ‘Huh, Wayne was good.’”
Like any versatile actor, Brady had performed dramatically before, but that was before his comedic fame. “It wasn’t my first dramatic work but in a time when folks know you for one specific thing like comedy specifically, and improve comedy, it kind of takes away the steam of anything else that you did pre-fame. So no matter what I had done, I had done a lot of dramatic TV work before that, the fact of the matter is I’m Wayne Brady, the guy from Who’s Line and the guy from that talk show. So I kind of have that battle to fight and win.”
Crossover director Preston A. Whitmore III saw the potential even in his comedic work. “That’s a testament to how much I really enjoyed Preston Whitmore. I met him at lunch. We talked and then he received a copy of me doing Chappelle’s Show and doing a couple other things that I’d done a while earlier. He looked at that and said, ‘You know, Wayne, I’ve got this role and I think that I’d love to have you do this because people would really be surprised with you being cast in it. And I think that you would do a great job.’ So to immediately have that faith, that was a nice pat on the back.”
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