From basketball player to interpreting the monster of ‘Predator’

A multitude of sports stars change registration at the end of their professional career. Many choose to remain linked to their respective field, others decide to invest, and others take a leap into other worlds, such as acting, a step that more and more celebrities are following. The last one has been DiLiegro Dataa former basketball player who has gone to the movies.

The American center with an Italian passport has been chosen to put himself in the shoes of one of the most charismatic characters in cinema, ‘Predator’, a role that was previously to be played by Jean-Claude van Dammebut that in the end went to another former basketball player, Kevin Peter Hallwho was tall enough to participate with other tall actors, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers y Jesse Ventura.

The former player will play the predator in ‘Predator: in the press’which is already available on Disney +, and which has changed registration after dedicate himself professionally to the sport for eight seasons and until 2019, when he retired. “They asked me to bring a little slenderness to the creature”, he has confessed to ‘Variety‘ compared to what his predecessors asked of him.

It is not his first role as an actor

“The first word the director said to me was ‘wild’”, he added in reference to his way of working with the predator’s disguise. A role that comes after having participated in other plots such as ‘The Walking Dead’ y ‘Sweet Home’. However, he also hopes to one day have a role as a human: “Someday I hope to have a human role too”.

About his career as a professional in basketball, he began playing for the Wildcats at the University of New Hampshire, but then headed to Italy to play for the Dinamo Basket Sassari and later in the Trieste basketball. A country that he left in 2014 to venture into Israel at the hands of the Hapoel Gilboa Galil Elyonto later return to Italy and play with the Mens Sana Siena and the Scaligera Basket Verona.