20 Of The Best Performances By Athletes-Turned-Actors In Hit Movies

The late, great character actor Philip Seymour Hoffman once said of acting, "The job isn't difficult. Doing it well is difficult." And if you've ever had the misfortune of watching Hulk Hogan in Mr. Nanny, then you probably know what he was talking about. Yet not every athlete who's made the leap into movies has fared so poorly. The following performances are so good, in fact, that many of the stars found a second life beyond sports.

Dan Marino

There isn't a Miami Dolphins fan alive who doesn't know the name Dan Marino. He played for the Dolphins for 17 years and broke dozens of records along the way. His 86.4 percent passing efficiency rating was just one of the reasons he was enshrined in the Hall of Fame in 2005; Marino still holds a position with the Dolphins to this day. But his role in one film threatened to overshadow all of that.

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994)

Marino and the Miami Dolphins play a pivotal role in the plot of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. The film — a massive hit with audiences, if not critics — is really a showcase for Jim Carrey, but Marino manages to do just enough to be a memorable presence. In fact, Marino told NFL Films in 2017 that fans still come up to him to say "laces out" all the time.

Carl Weathers

There's not a lot to say about Carl Weathers' professional football career. He played eight regular-season games for the Las Vegas Raiders in 1970 and 1971 and 18 games for the British Columbia Lions in the Canadian Football League. And that's all we know. “I was good enough to fool 'em, but never dedicated enough to become a great player,” Weathers told The Washington Post newspaper in 1979. It seems he always had one eye on acting.

Predator (1987)

We could have chosen any one of a handful of iconic moments that Weathers has brought to the big screen. There's his towering performance as Apollo Creed in the Rocky franchise, of course. But our favorite is that prolonged, competitive handshake he shared with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator. "It was scripted that [Schwarzenegger] was going to win, but of course, I am not going to concede that without making him work for it," Weathers told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015.