Swanson: USC’s Ceyair Wright has good angle on football, acting dreams

LOS ANGELES – USC cornerback Ceyair Wright is determined to eat his cake and have it too and I love that for him.

This dude is dreaming about a Super Bowl ring and an EGOT? Talking about reaching the NFL’s pinnacle and also joining the 17 performers to take home an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony? OK, then!

And not just dreaming – doing. Doing too much, for sure. That’s so much better than doing too little.

Especially these days, with all the buzz about “quiet quitting.” That’s the moniker for putting in the bare minimum of effort at work. It’s meant to knock the corporate hustle, but it’s also saying it’s cool to run from the grind.

Wright is all about the grind. In fact, No. 22 asked for seconds.

In this age of hyper-specialization, multi-sport athletes are pressured to find the pigeonhole and get comfortable. Multi-discipline performers? Might as well be intergalactic explorers.

But here one is, a redshirt freshman impressing his coaches and climbing the depth chart at training camp by day and showing up on TV every Wednesday night, part of the ensemble of young actors on Freeform’s fifth season of “Grown-ish.”

The audacious cornerback-thespian seems as fitting a candidate as there is to help Coach Lincoln Riley’s new-look USC football team find its way back into the national spotlight.

If what Wright’s up to seems wild to you, consider: Football and acting? Basically the same thing.

To wit, reviews. There’s going to be some bad ones.

Take The Guardian’s critique of “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” in which Wright played LeBron James’ fictional older son Darius James: “Garish and soulless sequel is a stinker.” Ouch.

Or USC assistant Donte Williams’ synopsis of Wright’s on-field performance this past spring: “Ceyair’s biggest problem is Ceyair… he has a lot of things going on. For all I know, he may be in ‘Space Jam 3’.” Dang.

But at 19 years old, the 6-foot-1 Wright estimates he’s been rejected for roles thousands of times. And by nature of his position on the football field, he’s been beaten plenty out there, too.

It makes for a thick-skinned young man with an impressively short memory.

“I’ve heard ‘no’ so many times, I don’t get fazed by criticism,” Wright said after practice this week, where USC prepared for its Sept. 3 opener against Rice. “I just take it in. Hear it, understand it and move forward. Allow it to better me.”

That process seems to have worked; when Riley assessed whose stock has risen most in training camp, he led with Wright: “He’s one of the first guys off my mind when I think about where he was in spring to now.”

Wright has bulked up and embraced all the extra stuff necessary to succeed on the gridiron. He’s spending more time in the recovery room, he’s stretching on his own at home, he’s watching more film. And, yes, after double-dipping all summer, he’s dutifully cleared his plate of everything but football and school during the season.

So now, the relatively raw talent, who appeared in just two games last season for the 4-8 Trojans, is up for the part as their second corner.

See? “With acting, there’s a lot of stuff that translates,” said Wright, whose memory is always getting a workout, whether he’s learning plays inside the lines and the lines in screenplays.

Repetition is key, too; every snap, every take, is another opportunity to improve.

“Like with this past season of ‘Grownish,’ from episode 1 to episode 18, I progressed a lot … just in terms of like comfortability,” said Wright, who plays Zeke, a football player who comes across as confident and endearing. “Over time, it’s like I know my character, I know what I want to do, so it’s a lot more natural.”

Yes, and then there’s his five-star improv skills. Wright has been trained to react quickly, to think on his feet. So when the folks casting “Space Jam” asked if he hooped, Wright’s instinctive response won him the role: He lied. He said he played on his high school’s varsity team.

“I’m sorry!” laughed Wright, who ran track at Loyola in addition to playing football. “I was just pretending for the part!”

And learning to take direction? Wright has had lots of practice with that, too – whether it’s coming from Riley or, say, Todd Biermann, who directed some of the “Grown-ish” episodes this season, which wrapped just before the Trojans opened camp.

“A director has a vision of what they want; a football coach has a plan, a scheme,” Wright said. “And they want to implement it with the people that they have with them, their team – whether it’s their team of actors or the team, the defense and offense.”

There’s a difference, however: “Football coaches are a little bit more abrasive.”

And as ruthlessly competitive a field as acting is, it’s nowhere near as violent as college football. But Wright lives to do his own stunts on Saturdays.

He says it’s a blessing to be living out his dreams: “I remember being younger, watching USC play on TV, and just being like, ‘Damn, hopefully I can be that one day.’ And now I’m here, and, you know, I’m doing work on television. It’s really fun.”