Travis Kelce’s Hollywood aspirations: How the football star is writing a new playbook for tackling showbiz

Travis Kelce is far from the first football star to make a name for himself in Hollywood but he is, in his own way, writing a new playbook for tackling showbiz.

In his scripted television debut in 2020, Travis Kelce, playing a hot-headed athlete-turned-astronaut, fell into a desert sinkhole and died. His career in Hollywood, however, is alive, well and seemingly with more prospects than ever for the Kansas City Chiefs tight end who appears to be exploring the career he wants to build beyond the goalposts. Thursday marks Kelce’s return to the field for his 12th season in the NFL as the league’s highest paid tight end. But he’s doing so with more eyes on him than ever, which is saying a lot for a three-time Super Bowl champ. He’s entering this season having just landed roles in the Ryan Murphy-produced FX show “Grotesquerie” and Adam Sandler’s hotly-anticipated “Happy Gilmore” sequel. In September, he will debut as the host of Prime Video’s upcoming game show “Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity?” He also just inked a deal upwards of $100 million to bring his popular sports podcast “New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce,” now in its third season, to Amazon’s Wondery. “We positioned Travis to be world famous,” André Eanes, who with his brother Aaron Eanes manages Kelce, told the New York Times in an April interview. “We didn’t know how it would happen, or when it would happen, or what would help push that further along. But it’s always been the thought in the back of our minds.” Kelce is far from the first to attempt to go from touchdowns to Tinseltown. Former NFL-ers Terry Crews and Michael Strahan and college football players Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Carl Weathers and Mark Harmon are among those who did it successfully. What he has made clear – both through the projects he chooses to pursue and his just-happy-to-be-here approach to being Taylor Swift’s boyfriend – is that Kelce is charting a path for himself in Hollywood in his own way and writing a new playbook for tackling showbiz. At the time he booked “Moonbase 8,” Kelce wasn’t a household name and had little acting experience. His only Hollywood job up until that point was starring in the 2016 E! dating reality show “Catching Kelce.” (Spoiler alert: It didn’t work out.)