“I am a hermit when I go to Miami,” Rob Corddry says. “When I get to Miami I’m either at work or I’m in my home. People think I’m joking about this but I’m literally doing puzzles in my underwear.”
Well, not all the time. The reason the actor finds himself in the Sunshine State to begin with is Ballers, the HBO series—which will start its second season July 17—in which he stars opposite Dwayne Johnson as Joe, a financial manager attempting to navigate the world of millionaire sports stars. Corddry, a veteran of Hot Tub Time Machine and Community, says it’s among the best gigs he’s ever had.
“It’s the only job I’ve ever had where I’m not like looking at the clock going, ‘Oh, my God, 14 hours left,’” he says. Of course, it helps that Corddry’s occasionally allowed to interact with real-life sports stars even when he’s off camera.
“I hardly ever get to meet the football players, I meet one a season or so it seems,” he says. But this season, in addition to have scenes with Baltimore Ravens linebacker Terrell Suggs, Corddry —an unapologetic New England Patriots fan—got a special surprise when his character’s real-life namesake invited tight end Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski to set. What happened when the two got together? “We did some Sudoku,” Corddry says with a laugh, “some classic hijinks: He wedgied me, there was some towel snapping.”
For the Massachusetts native, it was a highlight of the new season, and just discussing it brought out his own inner sports fanatic. “I have been a Red Sox fan my entire life, now of course the Red Sox are sort of the bad guys now, but for the majority of my life I was rooting for the underdog, and it feels really good to route for the bad guys,” he explains. “It’s definitely a black hat-white hat kind of thing, and I just raise my middle fingers to the football world and say, ‘go Pats.’”
