When college basketball star Marc Blucas did not make the NBA, he decided to apply to law school. The day before he was scheduled to take the Law School Admission Test, he unwound by watching Rob Reiner’s courtroom drama A Few Good Men (1992) and realized that what excited him about the film was not the law, but the acting. A few years later, Blucas was a television veteran with several feature films under his belt and a coveted spot in Vanity Fair’s prestigious Hollywood Issue.
Born Marcus Paul Blucas on January 11, 1972, the actor grew up in the small town of Girard, PA. The son of a school superintendent and an education administrator, he made his stage debut as a cupcake in his third grade class’ production of Hansel and Gretel. At 6′2″ tall, he was the star center on the Girard High School basketball team. An All-State athlete, Blucas averaged 20.8 points and 10.1 rebounds per game and lead his team to two 2A championships. In his senior year, the team went undefeated and was ranked among the best high school basketball teams by USA Today. Blucas earned a full scholarship to Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, where he majored in business with a minor in speech communication and played shooting guard and small forward for the Wake Forest Demon Deacons. He competed in four NCAA tournaments and won the Murray C. Greason Sr. Athletic Academic Award and the Weaver-James-Corrigan Postgraduate Scholarship in his senior year. When Blucas was not picked in the NBA draft, he joined the Manchester Giants and played pro basketball in England for one season. After starting a company that was targeted to assist athletes in endorsement and contract negotiations, he intended to go to law school but tried his hand at acting instead.