10 Facts About ‘America’s Got Talent: The Champions’ Host Terry Crews
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America’s Got Talent has an all-new spin-off coming our way next week, and with it, and all-new host! Terry Crews will be joining the fray for America’s Got Talent: The Champions, and here are 10 facts about the newest member of the AGT family!
1. Terry has always been a man of many talents: he won two college scholarships in the arts for Interlochen Center for the Arts and Western Michigan University, as well as a full athletic one for the latter. The athletic scholarship was for football, of course, and he helped the Western Michigan Broncos to victory in the 1988 Mid-American Conference Championship.
2. Terry went on to play on four different American NFL teams as well as the Rhein Fire in the former NFL Europe league for a brief period in the middle of his career.
3. He played football professionally until his retirement from the sport 1997, the immediately switched back to pursuing his original goal of working in the film industry. Despite bouncing back and forth between the physical and the creative, Terry got to combine the two when Adam Sandler modified a role in his remake of The Longest Yard just for him!
4. Before he began acting, Terry used what he had learned in art school as a courtroom sketch artist and by doing portraits of other NFL players. He later went on to co-found furnishing design company Amen&Amen.
5. Even though Terry has gone on to become a famous actor over the past two decades, he had never taken a single acting class before booking his first gig! While his dream was always to work in film, he never thought he’d be on camera himself.
6. Despite initially being known for comedy films such as White Chicks and the aforementioned The Longest Yard remake, Terry seems to have had the most success on the small screen. His most famous roles have been Julius Rock of Everybody Hates Chris and Terry Jeffords on Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Between those shows and now hosting Champions, it might be safe to say he’s found his home in the TV world!
7. It’s not just live action TV that Terry thrives in; he’s also found a passion for voiceover work in animation! His best known role in that field was probably as the replacement voice actor for the character Officer Earl Devereaux in Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2.
7. AGT: The Champions won’t be Terry’s first rodeo as a television host. He hosted Who Wants to be a Millionaire? for a little while as well as three seasons of Netflix’s obstacle course competition show Ultimate Beastmaster.
8. Terry has been very open about the tough times he has faced in his life, from his abusive father to his struggles with addiction to his experience with sexual assault. He discussed some of these issues in his autobiography Manhood: How to Be a Better Man or Just Live with One and later came forward with his story of being sexually assaulted in support of the #MeToo movement.
This whole thing with Harvey Weinstein is giving me PTSD. Why? Because this kind of thing happened to ME. (1/Cont.)
— terry crews (@terrycrews) October 10, 2017
I decided not 2 take it further becuz I didn’t want 2b ostracized— par 4 the course when the predator has power n influence. (9/cont.)
— terry crews (@terrycrews) October 10, 2017
9. Terry was named TIME magazine’s “Person of the Year” in 2017 as one of the “Silence Breakers” at the forefront of the aforementioned #MeToo movement.
Terry is pretty great in all the programs he has done. Glad he is doing AGT because Tyra sucked as host just as she does on DWTS