Ohio State Football: Former running back now scoring in Hollywood

Former Ohio State football player Maurice Hall is scoring big in other ways these days. Hall lives in Los Angelis, California raising his children and working in the television and movie industry. Hall’s transition from football to film wasn’t conventional, to say the least.

“After football, that was a rough time for me,” Hall recounts on The OHIO Podcast. “The goal was to go to the league. As much as people told you, you should have something to fall back on, or you should be doing internships, at the end of the day, I was like, ‘I’m good.’”

Following his career at Ohio State, a career that included the game-winning touchdowns against both Illinois and TTUN in the 2002 Championship season, Hall received an opportunity to fulfill his dream of playing in the NFL with the San Diego Chargers. That dream however was short-lived.

Hall returned to Columbus and continued his education working towards his master’s degree while working for Gene Smith as an Assistant to the Athletic Director. It was during this time he received an opportunity to work a side hustle with NBC4 WCMH-TV as a sports analyst covering Ohio State. Hall began doing small skits in an attempt to bring in more viewership to the programming.

“I had fun with it,” Hall admitted. “My first live shoot on the field was the absolute worst in history and someone I knew suggested I take an acting class to help out with the live shoots. I had been doing interviews for eight years, but that is totally different than when you are just talking to a camera.”

Following that first acting class, Hall discovered his passion. Performing in front of the camera would become the driving force behind all the decisions he would make from that point on, including a move to the mecca of acting.

“It hasn’t been an easy process,” Hall explained. “I moved out here (to L.A.) in 2009 and I didn’t book my first acting job until 2013. I had 89 auditions. I had 89 no’s until I got my first job on the Mindy Project, which was on FOX at the time. The Biggest thing I learned from football was that every play is designed to be a touchdown, but 99% of the time it’s 2 yards, or maybe an 8-yard gain, or even a tackle-for-loss. But if you just keep playing, eventually one of those plays is going to work where you are going to break that long one. That’s how I looked at the audition process when it came to my work as an actor.”

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Hall kept plugging away, kept working, kept training himself as an actor, just like had as an athlete, and now Maurice is the most successful former Buckeye to have ever produced in Hollywood. So much so that he has a pretty extensive IMDb page. He has also started writing and directing and has recently produced a short film titled Harvest.

“It’s about my parent’s life in overcoming drug addiction and overcoming the environment they grew up in to find God and make a better life for their kids, i.e. me and my siblings,” Hall stated. “The message (of the film) is that it’s never too late, regardless of the decisions you make. People look at me and say, ‘he has done so many great things,’ but it has all been because my parents made that one decision to do something different.”

The success of Harvest has led Hall to try his hand at a full-length featured film titled The Seed, which has some pretty big names attached to the project including Mary J. Blige, Russell Hornsby, and Michael Rainey Jr.