Basketball players are used to being coached, but never quite like this. For the new movie Hustle, a cast of NBA players, including Utah Jazz forward Juancho Hernangómez and Minnesota Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards, had to learn the ropes of a whole new type of performance: acting. To prepare them for a film set, the production turned to Noëlle Gentile, a teacher and acting coach who worked with Hustle director Jeremiah Zagar on his previous film We the Animals. 

“I had a nontraditional path into this role and, you know, to be perfectly honest, a lot of my methods have come from teaching and working with a range of students from kindergarten all the way through college, over a 20-year period,” Gentile tells Tudum. “For me, a lot of what I do is create space for people to feel vulnerable, to feel safe, to explore and play basically.”

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Hustle stars Adam Sandler as Stanley Sugerman, a scout for the Philadelphia 76ers who discovers an exceptionally talented streetball player named Bo Cruz (Hernangómez) in Spain. Risking both his job and his shot at ever becoming a coach because he believes Bo is destined for greatness, Stanley brings Bo to the states and devises an intense training regimen that will hopefully prepare him for the NBA. Off-screen, Hernangómez embarked on a similar journey when it came to his acting. 

In the early days of production, Gentile and Hernangómez met over Zoom and worked on being truly vulnerable on-screen. “We spent so much time that you guys cannot imagine [on Zoom calls],” Hernangómez tells Tudum. Some exercises were easier than others. “You gotta stare at one person, at their eyes,” Hernangómez says. “And don’t talk and keep looking at the eyes for like 5 minutes, for 10 minutes. That’s intense exercise. Like, it helps to get the confidence of the other person and see others’ feelings.”

Gentile’s work with Hernangómez also helped him create a history for his character, Bo Cruz, who begins the film as a young father who has lived a life of his own. “We used the script as sort of a starting off point,” Gentile says. “Then we would explore things that were mentioned in the script but not fully imagined. And created that world together.” 

Watch Juancho Hernangómez Audition for Hustle

One of the exercises that Gentile assigned her student was writing letters in character as Bo Cruz. “She gave me a week to write a letter to [Bo’s] daughter or [Bo’s] dad who left [him],” Hernangómez says. “I’m really close with my dad in real life... The only goal I have is to be like my dad. And so knowing Bo Cruz left his dad at [an] early age, putting me in that position, that kind of hurts me.” Hernangómez channeled the sadness and frustration he discovered during these exercises into his performance.

This training also brought in the other, non-basketball player stars of the film. “Juancho and María Botto and Ainhoa [Pillet], who plays his daughter, the four of us were together sort of building a history of those characters based on what was in the script,” Gentile says. It was a process that involved heavy improvisation and emotional work. One scene late in the film, where Cruz and Sugerman clash in a car ride around Philadelphia, found Hernangómez reaching outside of his comfort zone and leaving the script behind. 

“There was some veering from the script in that, because he was just, he was really dropped into this scene,” Gentile says. “So I think that in building out a character well beyond the script and [doing improv] and exploring all these moments of a character’s life, when he’s sitting in the car with Adam, there’s a whole relationship there, there’s a whole history there.” 

“Noëlle gave me the feelings,” Hernangómez says. “Noëlle [taught me] how to cry in the scene with my mom. She was there for me, anytime, whatever I need, she was there.” For the car scene, Gentile sat with Hernangómez and did meditative exercises with him, preparing him to get into an on-screen screaming match with one of cinema’s greatest yellers. It’s no surprise Hernangómez felt she was invaluable to the production. “Noëlle was the most important person for me on the movie,” he says. “Every credit I’m gonna have for the movie is because of Noëlle.”

Other actors required different types of engagement. For Anthony Edwards, who plays antagonist Kermit Wilts, Gentile leaned into his preexisting on-camera energy as a basketball player. “[He] just loves being in front of the camera,” Gentile says. “He’s so charming and charismatic.”

But if Edwards was in his comfort zone on camera, Gentile had to get out of hers a bit to help him prepare for a basketball sequence. “I’m not athletic at all,” she tells us. “I don’t play, I’ve never played sports or anything like that, but Ant and I are in a scene trying to create something realistic.” In the end, Gentile solved her problem the same way she would have advised one of her students to: by being transparent and asking a question. “What I don’t know, I don’t know,” she says. “So I don’t know, what would you say in this moment on court? And having a conversation about that... makes it easier for me to give what they need to play this scene out.” 

So, how do you teach an NBA player to act? It turns out, the same way you’d teach anyone else. Rather than breaking them of their performative habits, Gentile tried to lean into what made each player unique. “[E]ach person had their own charismatic gift,” Gentile says. “And it was just a matter of tapping into that and creating a space for them to exhale into it. So it wasn’t like anybody necessarily came with it with an idea of, this is how I act. There was an openness to exploring and discovering it together.”