The Grotesquerie Cast Has Nothing But Praise for Team Player Travis Kelce

On the purple-carpet premiere for Ryan Murphy’s latest FX horror goopfest, Grotesquerie, the cast was sworn to secrecy on all things, well, grotesque. They couldn’t talk plot, they couldn’t talk episodes, they couldn’t talk spoilers, but they could talk Travis Kelce.

The Kansas City Chiefs tight end, podcaster, and Taylor Swift beau couldn’t be there for the premiere itself — don’t you know there’s football going on right now — but his mom, Donna, was there in his stead, fielding questions alongside his co-stars about the athlete’s talents. (Mama Kelce — never one to mince words — replied, more than once, to a reporter’s question of “How are you tonight?” with an iconic and straightforward “Oh, you know.”) Much has been written about Travis’s work with an acting coach in the months leading up to his television debut, but one core question went unanswered going into the Grotesquerie premiere: Did he teach any of his co-stars how to throw a football?

“Travis Kelce did not teach me how to throw a football. I don’t think that’s teachable for me,” co-star Raven Goodwin said with a laugh. “But he’s a great guy, he killed it. Super proud of him.”

For as proud of him as Kelce’s castmates seemed, Courtney B. Vance — a TV veteran who last worked with Murphy on American Crime Story in 2016 — said the athlete did have kind of a steep learning curve when it came to doing work that wasn’t live on ESPN. “Kelce had to [learn] that after they shoot your coverage, they’ve gotta turn around and shoot my coverage while you’re doing the same thing. Then they have to do her coverage, then her coverage. We’ve gotta do two-shot, the wide, the close-up. He was like, ‘I gotta do it again? And again? And again?’” Vance explained.

“I didn’t mention football in our conversations,” Micaela Diamond said — okay, did anyone who worked on this show know what his main job is? — but added that they did talk about their grandmothers. Did Travis teach his grandmother how to throw a football? It’s possible we’ll never know. 

While Vance didn’t get the football lesson he might have hoped for, he does imagine that Kelce would owe him one if he’s ever out on the field. “I would hope that he would help me. I helped him … and he would be kind to me,” he said with a smile.