DeVaughn Nixon was exposed to the entertainment industry at a young age. He was a child actor in “Terminator 2” and “The Bodyguard” before turning 10 years old, working on the same sets as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner – starting a snowball fight with Houston and Costner in Lake Tahoe, which was the first time he saw snow.
He grew up loving movies, theater-hopping with his grandfather at a young age after his mom would drop them off at 7 a.m. and pick them up 12 hours later after they watched every movie the theater was showing.
“That’s what got me into entertainment,” Nixon told OSDB Sports.
Nixon, whose stepmother is five-time Emmy winner Debbie Allen, first took acting classes when he was 4, remembering how nervous and scared he was to get up on stage in front of a crowd – a pivotal moment in his career, he says.
Yet, despite all the experience he’s had in acting, he’s never taken on a role this close to home. In HBO’s new series on the Showtime Lakers, “Winning Time,” Nixon plays his father, Norm Nixon – Los Angeles’ All-Star point guard who won two NBA titles with the Lakers and was an All-Rookie selection in 1977-78.
The casting choice couldn’t have been any better, but if not for one of DeVaughn’s high school friends, he may not have gotten the chance to play his dad in this iconic role.
“One of my buddies, who I grew up with in high school and is an ex-manager of mine, texted me and said, ‘Here, you should play your dad.’ Sent me the script and I was like, ‘Whoa,’” Nixon said. “I immediately called my manager and I was like, ‘Did you guys not hear about this?’ They called the next day and got me an audition.
Nixon and his brother both went out for the role, but they had a silent pact where they didn’t really talk about it. They didn’t really discuss it with their dad, either.
“I’m not a person that talks. I move in silence,” Nixon said. “So if I have something, then I speak on it.”
When Nixon earned the role, he let his dad know – and got a patented dad response: “Cool.”
It wasn’t out of the ordinary for Norm Nixon to have a brief response to such awesome news, because that’s the type of person he is. DeVaughn knows his dad is happy for him and was excited about the opportunity for his son to play him in the series, but he let family and friends know that more than he did DeVaughn.
“He’s just like a low-key dude. He doesn’t exert energy if he doesn’t have to,” Nixon said. “If something’s not funny, he’s not a yes man. He doesn’t laugh. Kind of like non-descript. Internally, I know he’s happy and he’s expressed that to family members and friends. But to me, no. I'm the type of person where I’ll play a basketball game, score 30 and he’ll tell me the one time that I didn’t get back on defense.”
DeVaughn played basketball in high school and took part in intramurals in college at Loyola Marymount University, where he earned degrees in business finance and TV production. As the son of a former NBA star, athletics are in his blood.
But the workout regimen for his role as Norm Nixon in “Winning Time” was “insane,” as he put it. He had to cut weight to fit his dad’s body type from the ‘80s, using photos of Cristiano Ronaldo as inspiration. He also had basketball practice five days a week to get ready for this role.
“I’m a runner. I love to run. But I had to turn it up to the 10thvolume,” he said. “I weighed like 187, pushing 190. I wanted to get bulkier. And once I got this role, I asked my dad how much he weighed and he was like 162, 163.
“I did intermittent fasting. I ran 3 miles a day for four or five months. And then HBO was gracious enough to send us meal plans. That helped a lot, just eating right, making sure the diet was right. So I cut down. As weird as this sounds, I looked at pictures of Cristiano Ronaldo all the time because he’s the most shredded person in the entire world, so I looked at that for inspiration. I finally got to a point where I was kind of as shredded, I'm not even going to lie.”
It didn’t help that Nixon was recovering from a torn meniscus in his right knee before filming started. The injury wasn’t because of the training plan for this role, but partly due to his knees always being “a little crazy.”
The rehab and physical therapy wasn’t easy, and he was still on crutches two weeks before they started shooting.
“I had to get knee surgery before I even started this. I had to go to physical therapy. It was my right knee. It wasn’t because of this. My knees have always been a little crazy because I ran a lot. I like to run. It’s how I get my freedom of thought and just vibe out,” he said. “Eventually, going as hard and rigorous as our practices were and the conditioning and all of that.
“The impact of jumping, landing. It eventually got to me, so I had to get surgery. That was one of the biggest challenges because we were two weeks out from shooting and I was on crutches. The most excruciating pain I’ve ever been in in my entire life. I didn’t want to get up and go to the bathroom. I was almost willing to piss on myself. That’s how much it hurt. I went to physical therapy. They helped me out and they got me back. And I went back on my knee earlier than the doctor said I could just because I wanted to go hard. It was my shot.
But after getting back into the flow of things, it didn’t take terribly long for Nixon to get his game back on the hardwood. It was like riding a bike, he says. But one of the challenges of playing his dad was mimicking his shooting style, the way he dribbled and everything in-between.
“We had a great coach named Idan Ravin. He’s coached a lot of NBA players,” Nixon said. “He helped me get my shot right. My shot was ugly. It went in, but whatever. I never shot over my head. I always used to bring it down low. He helped me fine tune it and kinda mimicked my dad. I got to my dad, picked his brain a little bit, showed me old-school drills he used to do, some signature moves. We were in basketball practice five days a week. Eventually, it was like riding a bike for me. I got all my s*** back.”
His dad helped a little bit, too, giving DeVaughn “a constructive critique” of his portrayal of himself after seeing a few scenes from the show. But for the most part, Norm let his son go to work and do what he does best: act.
“For me, it was just being around him more, picking his brain, asking different stories,” DeVaughn said of what helped him accurately play the part. “He’s from Georgia so he has a different kind dialect, so I added a little southern twang to how I delivered my lines. I tried to mimic him as much as possible.”
Nixon wasn’t necessarily old enough to remember specific details about his father’s career as an NBA star. He was born in 1983, which was his dad’s last year with the Lakers. Norm Nixon played his final NBA season in 1988-89, so most of what DeVaughn knows about his dad’s time with the Lakers and Clippers was from what people told him.
“I remember them telling me he was a dog on the court,” he said. “You know Kawhi Leonard? A monster. Silent, though. He’ll give you a silent 30 points. That’s who my dad was. Give you a silent 20 points, 10 assists.”
Off the floor, Nixon remembers everyone complimenting his dad’s looks.
“I just remember how women always said he was fine. I remember him being a pretty boy,” he joked. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh my god, your dad’s so fine.’ The girls I dated, they said, ‘Oh my god, your dad’s so handsome.’”
Nixon plans to watch “Winning Time” with his dad, the two of them alone together. That’s obviously a unique experience that few people get to share with their father, and he hopes his performance in the series highlights his dad’s legacy.
Because when people think of the Showtime Lakers, they typically go to Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, not necessarily Norm Nixon. He hopes “Winning Time” changes that.
“He’s gonna watch it with me,” he said. “I invited him to the premiere but he’s so withdrawn from media, he doesn’t even care. He was like, ‘We’ll watch it together by ourselves.’
“He’s not a fictitious character. He’s walking around, living and breathing. He’s a sportscaster. People do know who he is. I want to highlight his legacy because when you think of Showtime, you think of Magic, Kareem. Nobody looks at the Jamaal Wilkes. Nobody looks at the Norm Nixons.”
