School drop-off was probably the last place Jay Ellis expected to land a role. The actor was walking out of his daughter’s classroom after getting her situated when he spotted Mindy Kaling coming down the hallway.
“She goes, ‘are you going to be my coach or what? Are you going to be my coach, Jay? Tell me now,’” Ellis recalls. “And I was like, ‘yeah, Mindy, I want to do it. I love you. You’re the funniest person in the world.’ That was my way in. I’ve never gotten a job at school drop-off before this.”
Netflix can thank a well-timed school run-in then for bringing Ellis to “Running Point,” the new Kaling-produced series on Netflix starring Kate Hudson as a Jeanie Buss-inspired owner of a Los Angeles professional basketball team. After premiering at the end of February, the series was just renewed for a second season.
The project is the first of two that Ellis has coming this spring: on April 4 he’ll be seen in the Lionsgate movie “Freaky Tales,” which opened the Sundance Film Festival in 2024 and caused so much buzz that hundreds of ticket holders were turned away at the door.
Jay Ellis
Ryan Williams/WWD
The roles are a step into the next stage of Ellis’ career. The 43-year-old became a breakout star with his role as Lawrence in “Insecure,” which ran from 2016 to 2021, and since then has been seen in “Top Gun: Maverick” and Dave Franco’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.” A former basketball player himself, Ellis can’t help but be drawn to sports roles — yet “Running Point” sees him making the shift from portraying a player to now a coach, and “Freaky Tales” required intense martial arts training.
“I love action and I get called for a thing, and it is not action,” Ellis says, alluding to the many heartthrob roles he’s done. While “Freaky Tales” was where he leaned…