Winning Time: Sean Patrick Small Explains Why He Was More Than Ready to Play Larry Bird [Interview]

Sean Patrick Small’s role on the HBO series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty was years in the making.

Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty centers on the professional and personal lives of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers. Small portrays the iconic Larry Bird, a role he was clearly meant to play.

I recently had the chance to speak with Small about how an interest in Larry Bird years ago led to him playing that role now.

“I’ll go all the way back for you to 2014. I was trying to find a way to interconnect my writing and acting loves and I’ve been told a lot of my life, especially playing basketball, ‘You look like Larry Bird.’ So, I thought, ‘All right, I wonder if he has a story that I could write and that I can act in,'” Small began.

He then read the book When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball and learned just how complex Larry Bird’s backstory was. It was then that he decided to write a biopic about him. “So, over the time frame of the six to seven years before I got this audition for Larry Bird, I had been researching, writing, pitching. We attached Thomas Carter, who’s an Emmy-winning director to the project.”

Initially, the role of Larry Bird on Winning Time was to be played by Bo Burnham. “I saw that he was initially cast in a deadline article in March. And when I was reading that, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s a bummer. I didn’t know that they were having a Larry Bird role for this. Because I definitely would’ve tried to go out for that.'”

Small was continuing to work on his own project when everything changed. “Suddenly, this casting notice popped up and my sister-in-law’s friend told me about it,” Small recalled. Two weeks later, he had landed the role.

“So a span of two crazy weeks, this whole seven-year research project of Bird got me into the role on Winning Time. It’s interesting, I’ve been going through different phases of accepting this, because at first, I was like, ‘Oh, this is incredible. The stars aligned.’ I had been wanting to do this for so long, but then you hear people say, ‘Oh, you got the role because you look like him, right?’ And I’m like, ‘No. I prepared.'”

“I was prepared for this in the moment, and it’s interesting to see this is seven years of culmination. Even if the project that I wrote doesn’t get made, it got me this role and it got me into this industry that I love. Even though I really do still feel like the project that I wrote can be made and it can be done really well, it led to something. The stars did align, but I was very much prepared.”

Small also shared that the cast of the show has become a “tight-knit family.”

“I’m friends with pretty much everyone that I’ve worked with. I live across the street from one of my buddies, Austin Aaron, who plays Mark Landsberger, so we hang out a lot. Quincy [Isaiah] and Solomon [Hughes] and I chat a lot throughout the days.” 

He said one of his favorite things about working on the show was to have that support system and to “just be able to go through this whole process with a group of guys and girls that are just amazingly talented, but also down to earth, humble and grounded human beings.”

Winning Time boasts an incredible cast, so I was also curious to know if there was anyone Small had been particularly excited to work with.

“I was intrigued to work with Quincy, because I was like, ‘Alright, this guy looks like Magic. Let’s see what he’s bringing to the role.’ And most of my stuff was with him,” he said.

“When we were doing the basketball scenes, I’m on set with Jason Segel, and Adrien Brody, and Spencer Garrett. And anytime that I wasn’t in front of the camera, I didn’t want to be in my trailer. I wanted to be near video village, watching these guys do their craft and it was like a masterclass every time I was on set. Watching them prepare before cameras’ even rolling, watching them think through the different beats, as they’re going through the scene.”

As for the Larry Bird project Small has been working on, he did confirm that he’s still working on it. “The project is almost like a prequel to the Winning Time storyline, because it’s about Bird and Magic from their high school years into college. And then the 1979 National Championship game, when they first played against each other. And that’s when the rivalry started, that’s what sparked March Madness, quote, unquote,” he explained.

“So it is something that I think could be made, because it’s not interlaced with what Winning Time is currently doing. It would be before and it would be like a coming of age story, for those two characters.”

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The Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty Season 1 finale airs tonight at 9/8c on HBO.

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