Neymar

Vin Diesel threw a phone at him like a grenade in a prop café. Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior intercepted it with a clean kick before it hit the floor. That ridiculous scene involving 2017 wasn't just a whim of a European football star. It reflected the natural instinct of someone who realized early on that his greatest talent was holding the camera's gaze.

From Globo soap operas to Hollywood screens

In Brazil, serialized fiction rules over every other TV format. Neymar began hanging around those soap opera sets when he was just starting to stand out with the ball at Santos. In 2011, he made his first appearance in Malhação, the longest-running youth soap opera on Globo. Two years later, he pulled off the same move in prime time with a comedic cameo in Amor à Vida.

Those appearances weren't aimed at dramatic prestige. They were meant to build a public figure who would spill beyond the boundaries of the pitch.

Nobody expected an Oscar nomination.

But his English-language breakthrough came soon, thanks to the extreme action franchise led by Paramount. In 2017, director D.J. Caruso cast him in xXx: Reactivated alongside Samuel L. Jackson. The film grossed more than $340 million at the global box office and gave him a place on giant screens, cracking short jokes in English. His acting was rough around the edges. Even so, it confirmed his appeal to audiences who watch fast-consumption movies.

The Netflix monastery and the editing cuts

In 2019, production company Vancouver Media signed him for the third season of Money Heist. The Brazilian filmed several scenes dressed as a monk alongside Pedro Alonso and Álvaro Morte. He played João, a silent friar who shared a dining hall with Berlin inside a Tuscan monastery.

The release of the episodes was not smooth. A sexual assault complaint filed against him in Paris forced the platform to pull his scenes from the initial cut just hours before the international launch. Weeks later, Brazilian police closed the case for lack of evidence, and the streaming giant restored his footage to the final version of the catalog.

In his most memorable line, the monk claims he likes neither parties nor soccer.

The joke had quite a bite to it.

It worked as a public relations move because the series was the most-streamed non-English-language TV show in the world at the time.

The character devours the athlete

The real audiovisual project behind it took several more years to take shape. In 2022, director David Charles Rodrigues premiered the documentary miniseries Neymar: El caos perfecto, with the executive producer of LeBron James backing the budget from Los Angeles. The cameras went inside the wealth management meetings where the striker's father handled his son's image rights with the coldness of an accountant.

So the production dropped the feel-good tone of a sports promo to show the real rift between the employee and his legal representative. The editing team cut four hundred hours of intimate footage to fit the final product into just three fifty-minute episodes.