‘Winning Time’ Star Sean Patrick Small Details Challenges of Playing Larry Bird (Exclusive)

Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty premiered on HBO and HBO Max on Sunday, and viewers got a chance to see what the Los Angeles Lakers were like during the 1980s. The viewers also got a taste of the well-known rivalry between Larry Bird vs. Magic Johnson. PopCulture.com recently caught up with Sean Patrick Small who plays Bird in Winning Time. He revealed a few of the biggest challenges portraying one of the best players in NBA history. 

“I went to YouTube right when I was getting the audition, because I was like, all right, I need to get the accent down and to not sound like a caricature of a Midwest twang or something like that,” Small exclusively told PopCulture. “So I was just powering through all these different interviews that I found on YouTube from random 30-second clips of him being interviewed at a college all-star game to interviews with him and Chick Hearn in the eighties and stuff like that.”

Small went on to explain what he had to do to be like Bird. “It was really getting the accent and then figuring out his physicality, how he moved and how he walked about the world,” Small said. “And that really helped me get into it because he had extremely good posture and I don’t have as good as posture as him, so it’s not easy for me to just be like, all right, shoulders back, stand up straight. And then that just helped me just slide right into the character. So things like that really helped push me toward that, in the audition process and on set.”

The first episode of Winning Time showed a glimpse of Bird when talking about the rivalry with Johnson. At the time, Johnson was getting ready to be drafted by the Lakers at No. 1 overall while Bird was selected No. 6 by the Celtics a year prior. After having an intestine rivalry in college, Bird and Johnson would battle in the NBA, winning eight combined championships from 1980 to 1988.

Along with playing Bird in Winning Time, Small is working miniseries about the Johnson-Bird rivalry. He said the series is being shopped around and has an award-winning director attached to the project. “We have Thomas Carter attached to direct it,” Small revealed. “He’s an Emmy-winning director. He directed Coach Carter. So we’re very excited to have him attached and we’re just shopping it around and seeing what can come of it and hopefully we can get it off the ground soon.”