John C. Reilly says his career was "dead in the water" when Adam McKay contacted him to star in Winning Time

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Reilly was at a career crossroads when McKay texted him and asked him to replace Michael Shannon in the role of Jerry Buss, according to The Hollywood Reporter's cover story on Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty. “I’d been sitting at my kitchen table, thinking, ‘Man, I’m dead in the water, all this work, 80 movies, and I got nothing going on,’ when I got the text from Adam,” Reilly said. The role was a perfect fit since Reily was already a big fan of Buss. “For all of his reputation for being a hedonist, he really believed in women,” Reilly explained, “and he gave a lot of them in his organization big starts when no one else was doing that.”