Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce has accomplished a lot in his NFL career, but he can add one new achievement to the list — movie producer.
Kelce executive produced the new dark comedy drama My Dead Friend Zoe, which stars Sonequa Martin-Green, Natalie Morales, Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman, Utkarsh Ambudkar and Gloria Reuben.
The film, directed by Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, premiered at South by Southwest on Saturday, though Kelce wasn’t expected to attend the premiere.
It’s Kelce’s first production credit on a film, and we’re awful curious of this hints he’s got an eye on Hollywood once his playing days are over.
He’s recently been dating Taylor Swift, who is planning on making her directorial debut sometime in the future. Perhaps Kelce is following in Swift’s footsteps by getting in on the motion picture industry.
Hausmann-Stokes, a military veteran and Bronze Star recipient, told Variety about how the Chiefs tight end got involved with the project.
“It was incredibly surreal to get that news,” Hausmann-Stokes said of Kelce’s executive producing the project. “Travis is supportive of the military and veterans, and when this project came across his team and his desk and they decided to do it in a big part for that reason. It was just really heartwarming and touching, and the amount of added limelight and energy that he’s brought to the project is just going to help it reach a broader audience.”
You can read the synopsis for the film below from SXSW, which does not yet have a distributor or a release date.
MY DEAD FRIEND ZOE is a dark comedy drama that follows the journey of Merit, a U.S. Army Afghanistan veteran who is at odds with her family thanks to the presence of Zoe, her dead best friend from the Army. Despite the persistence of her VA group counselor, the tough love of her mother and the levity of an unexpected love interest, Merit’s cozy-dysfunctional friendship with Zoe keeps the duo insulated from the world. That is until Merit’s estranged grandfather—holed up at the family’s ancestral lake house—begins to lose his way and is need of the one thing he refuses… help. At its core, this is about a complicated friendship, a divided family and the complex ways in which we process grief.
