Interview: NFL Star Simeon Rice Returns to Artistic Roots With New Thriller ‘Unsullied’

Submitted by HollywoodChicago.com on September 2, 2015 - 9:29pm

CHICAGO – Chicago native Simeon Rice is well-known in the world of sports. Where the Super Bowl champion and future Hall of Famer isn’t known, though, is in Hollywood. He’s now hoping to cross over. HollywoodChicago.com recently sat down with Rice to talk about his directorial debut.

Listen to our full interview below!

After being lightning fast at the 100-meter dash (10.37 seconds from a standstill) and the 40-meter dash, Rice recalls the first time he ran the 400-meter dash. He ran track and had never lost a race before then, but not knowing how to pace it, Rice recalls the feeling of a “bear jumping on his back” as he placed dead last.

But before he got into sports, he was into art and drawing in grade school. He eventually felt compelled to focus more on sports rather than art and didn’t think they could correlate. Rice’s mom, who passed away just a week before this interview, always wanted him to come back to art.

And that’s what he’s doing now by crossing into film. “I just celebrate life,” Rice said, who went to film school. “I continue to set bars and structure for myself. Film is my next chapter.”

After dabbling in short films and selling a TV show called “Hardwood” to HBO, the new woman-in-distress thriller “Unsullied” is Rice’s directorial debut. The film also stars Rusty Joiner, James Gaudioso, Erin Boyes and Cindy Karr. Rice started a film production company called Dreamline Pictures, and after a year, didn’t have anything to show from it.

NFL star and “Unsullied” filmmaker Simeon Rice in Chicago on Aug. 18, 2015.
Image credit: Adam Fendelman, HollywoodChicago.com

“It started out as a pretend business – a hobby,” Rice said to his writing partner, to whom he paid much of his HBO payout. “A business makes money.” Determined to show the entertainment industry that he’s not a one-off act, “Unsullied” is Dreamline’s first feature-film release.

Rice cast the new actress Murray Gray to “find a new face”. “We’re in the position of power and influence. We should use that for good. Someone opened a door for me and it’s incumbent upon me to pay that forward. Murray deserved it and had to earn it.”

Reminding me of Eli Roth movies where women were victimized, I asked Rice about Roth’s “Hostel” films. Ironically, Rice said he watched them right before he wrote “Unsullied,” which was edited by an editor who cut “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”.

Rice also spent a good deal of time picking the music for the film. With a production budget of about $1.5 million, he wanted to feature new music rather than picking established artists. “When I said I wanted to do an indie film, I went all indie – including for the music.”

“Unsullied” opened in limited theatres nationwide on Aug. 28, 2015. While it doesn’t yet have box-office numbers and only currently has four reviews on Rotten Tomatoes (three of them are negative), Rice has already written other scripts and plans to continue with filmmaking. “This will not be the first and the last time Hollywood hears from me,” Rice said.