Marlon Wayans has opened up about his specific approach to playing a real-life person in his new Prime Video movie Air, in which he plays former Olympics coach George Raveling.
Air follows the true story of shoe salesman Sonny Vaccaro, who was instrumental in Nike's involvement with basketball star Michael Jordan.
Matt Damon stars as Vaccaro while Ben Affleck, who also directs, plays Nike co-founder Phil Knight. Wayans' character Raveling worked with the USA basketball team (and therefore Jordan) at the 1984 and 1988 Olympics.
Related: How Air’s Ben Affleck and Matt Damon plan to change Hollywood
In an exclusive interview with Digital Spy, Wayans opened up about his "loose" approach to playing Raveling.
"I talked to my brother Damon who's friends with Jordan, and he spoke to Jordan and he knew George. My brother gave me some talk about George and Jordan's relationship, and then I just watched a lot of tape for the accent and watched as much YouTube videos as I can," Wayans said.
"What I loved was we walked into this and Ben and Matt were like, 'It's loose, it's not like you have to be spot-on, it's not impressions, bring yourself to it, we're filling out these characters that nobody knows enough about.' We got to fill the spirit of the character as actors."
Related: Ben Affleck's Nike movie Air debuts with 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating
Co-star Matt Damon added: "That's a really good point. One of the things we did with this movie was we hired filmmakers. Viola [Davis] and Julius, they're great actors, but they're also A-list producers. Marlon, Chris Tucker, they're great actors but they're also writers, as stand-ups, they're writing all the time."
He continued: "Jason Bateman, he's a great actor, but he's also a writer, director, producer. We needed that as Marlon says, part of it was putting the actors in a position where they could build the characters from the ground up because that's what we needed."
Air is released in cinemas on April 5.
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Reporter, Digital Spy
Jacob is a freelance writer who specialises in narrative TV and film.
He graduated from the University of Roehampton with an MA in Journalism and has written for several publications since, including Gold Derby, Insider, and Screen Daily.
Jacob has covered major events in the world of film and TV, including numerous BAFTA ceremonies and the Cannes Film Festival, while he's also been an awards expert for several publications, including Korea's Arirang. His particular areas of interest include Star Wars, the MCU, the Oscars, and Hugh Grant.
Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.
