WHEN MATTHEW A. CHERRY decided to make the transition from being a wide receiver for the National Football League (NFL) to pursue a career in the entertainment industry, he had no idea he would become “one of only 39 people of color to ever win the most prestigious award in Hollywood”. Last year, he won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film for Hair Love, a story he had written and directed about an African-American father attempting to do his daughter’s hair for the first time.
Born in Chicago in the United States (US), Cherry began his early childhood playing sports and had big dreams of becoming a professional sportsman. He fell in love with football by the age of six after a brief stint with baseball. At the time, he had no idea how much the sport would change his life. Football got Cherry a full scholarship to study at the University of Akron in Ohio, and through that, he got his first big break; being drafted to the prestigious NFL, where he would spend the next couple of years playing for the Jacksonville Jaguars, Cincinnati Bengals, Carolina Panthers, and Baltimore Ravens.
“I was always interested in film, in entertainment in general and music and I knew really early on that I wasn’t going to have a long career in the NFL and decided to retire probably a lot earlier because I got tired of moving and traveling the world in that way. I ended up retiring in 2006 and then moving to Los Angeles in 2007 to pursue a career in film and TV,” says Cherry in an interview with FORBES AFRICA from the US over Zoom in March.
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