Since 2006, the television show “The Game” has aired on The CW, BET and now Paramount+, which means actor Hosea Chanchez has reprised his role as Malik Wright three different times.
“Thank God it’s been successful on three different networks,” he said to Doug Kolk on KTLA 5’s Morning News.
“From an acting perspective, this is a dream come true! The shelf-life of a character, if you are fortunate, you get a six-year syndication deal out of one show,” he exclaimed. “To be able to do this for the majority of my career, it’s a huge blessing as an artist to have a consistent job.”
Fans know Chanchez’s character as the slick-talking, braggadocious football star Malik Wright, but as the show enters a new era, his character gets more real and tackles heavy topics like mental health.
He credits showrunner Devon Greggory for building the platform for these conversations that have helped him as well.
“Through discovering the core of what Malik was going through allowed me to discover some things about myself that I needed to have healed or resolved within myself,” he explained.
When the show first aired 16 years ago, it was a 30-minute comedy as a companion piece to the hit “Girlfriends.”
“We were ‘The Little Engine That Could,’ nobody thought we would make it,” Chanchez revealed.
In 2021, Paramount+ revived the series with a relocated setting from San Diego to Las Vegas, which Chanchez called a “reunion and a homecoming.”
New episodes of “The Game” drop every Thursday on Paramount+.
