HBO’s retro hit “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty” returns for its second season Sunday night at 9 with Michael Chiklis and Sean Patrick Small reprising their roles as Boston basketball legends Red Auerbach and Larry Bird.
With the responsibility that comes with stepping into these sizable shoes, how did they pitch themselves into that mindsight?
“Very carefully. With joy,” Chiklis, 59, answered, in an interview prior to the current actors’ strike. “We’ve been talking about all the ways that you can get all caught up with the responsibility of it. If you just get in your head, it would all go wrong.
“So first of all, you have to trust. The producers and the writers are top notch – as are all the departments. Then you have to come from a place of authenticity, Like, ‘Hey, I respect these people and what they represented.’ Not just to the city of Boston, but the game of basketball to the country. To their legacy.”
“It’s definitely shoes to fill,” Small, who turns 31 Tuesday, agreed. “You have to try to figure out where everything is, to ground yourself in those moments through the research and the backstory and all that we get to showcase to the audience this year. Between the two of us in Season 2 we peel back those layers. It’s a lot of fun.”
“Everybody,” Chiklis noted, “did a decent amount of research. I read several books on Red,” who was 89 when he died in 2006. “My favorite was Bill Russell’s book about his relationship with Red” — the 1965 autobiography “Go Up for Glory.”
“Just really beautifully written, lovely accounts of this friendship, this relationship, over the years. It provided me with a ton of insights about what sort of man Red was — and I liked that it was from a third party, that it wasn’t in Red’s words. I found that fascinating.
“YouTube is a helluva resource because there’s so many videos of interviews that let you gain insight into the way the man spoke, the way he walked, the way he spoke to his team. That coupled with a bunch of these different testimonials from other people and stuff in his own words — you really get a sense of who this guy was.”
Added Small, “I had started writing a miniseries back in 2014, about Bird from his senior high school year to 1979 when he played Magic Johnson in the college championship game. So I had a bunch of research that just came hand in hand in terms of backstory for rolling into the rookie year that was Season 1 of this series.”
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