It was very young in his native Guyana that Nathanaël fell in love with basketball. As a teenager he dreamed of becoming a professional and even playing in the NBA, the prestigious American championship. At the age of 16, he landed in Cholet, land of basketball in France and combined studies and sport. But her destiny points her in a completely different direction: modeling.
“I’m coming for my dream which is to become a professional basketball player. In the training center I’m in a world that I don’t know, a lot of training. It was a real challenge because it was hard mentally. ” Left to his own devices at such a young age, Nathanaël finds it difficult to reconcile sport and studies. Training ends late, he has to do his homework after 10:30 p.m.: “My first year at Cholet I repeated a year and I missed my baccalaureate by one point.”
“In my room I had stuck basketball posters everywhere and when I arrived in France friends told me that I had the physique to be a model. I answered: yes, when I will be a basketball player in the NBA.” They weren’t wrong, just like this photographer who meets the young basketball player in the street and predicts a fine career as a model. He takes photos of Nathanael who will only post them on social networks six months later. This will be enough to get him started: “The Mister National election detected me. I took part in the Mister Île-de-France contest and I won.” He then held his first role as an extra alongside Tom Cruise in the film Mission impossible 6. Then everything quickly followed with her first modeling contract in China. He left for three months but stayed there for eight, between Shanghai and Hong Kong, his career was launched.
“When I set foot on a shooting set I found myself in my element. I said to myself wow this is what I want to do”and Nathanaël does it so well that he does not see himself doing anything else or returning to basketball, especially since he was able to reconcile the two: “The times when I was able to do shootings with a basketball, there, I was in heaven.”
