'Shooting Stars': Caleb McLaughlin Talks Playing Basketball Star in Peacock Film (Exclusive)

A Stranger Things star is taking his basketball skills to new heights in the new movie Shooting Stars which is now streaming on Peacock. In an exclusive interview with PopCulture.com, Caleb McLaughlin talks about portraying Lil Dru Joyce III in Shooting Stars, which is about LeBron James and his high school teammates becoming one of the best teams in the country. 

"We get a glimpse of LeBron's legacy and his story, but just it's more that basketball is more than a game," McLaughlin exclusively told PopCulture. "It's about community. It's about support from your friends, your family. And you just get to see Mookie Cook kill it as LeBron James."

In Shooting Stars, Lil Dru convinces LeBron, Wille McGee (Avery Wills Jr.) and Sian Cotton (Khalil Everage) to play for a predominantly white Catholic school instead of the high school they have planned to go to for years because the coach wanted to separate the Fab Four and put him on junior varsity. Their new coach (Dermot Mulroney) is hesitant to play the group but quickly learns how talented they are and become a force for the next four seasons. Dru is a sharpshooter who doesn't back down from a challenge, no matter how short he is. 

"I didn't feel like I had any relation to even Dru's life coming into this, besides loving the game of basketball, but the competitive nature that I had to have, understanding that he had to go up against point guards that were taller than him," McLaughlin said. "And he was probably five-two in high school. I mean, I wasn't five-two in high school. I was average height, and I wasn't hooping basketball. ...I didn't have to face that level of competitiveness in acting. No one was like, 'Oh, you're too short to be an actor.' There's no such thing as that. You know what I mean? So it's like it don't really matter. But knowing that he had to have a different level of confidence, if it was someone even telling him he could do it or not, he had to believe it in himself. So going into it, I left with a different level of confidence."  

Shooting Stars also features Wood Harris, Sterling "Scoot" Henderson, Katlyn Nichol, Natalie Paul and Algee Smith. LeBron James is a producer of the film, which is based on the book he wrote with Buzz Bissinger. 

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