Michigan Wolverines Football: Elliott Mealer Latest Alum To Turn Actor
Former Michigan Wolverines football offensive lineman Elliott Mealer is the latest former player to try his hand at acting.
Mealer (2008-12) talked about his budding career on the Michelle McMahon podcast last October. Many remember that he lost his father and girlfriend in a December 2007 auto accident, one that left his brother, Brock, paralyzed from the waist down. Brock has since taken steps with the help of former U-M strength coach Mike Barwis.
"After the accident, I could never imagine playing football again," Elliott Mealer told WTOL last year. "For me it was like, not only how could I play football, but why would I even care to play football again, there's so many more important things," Elliott said. "Ironically enough, I think football really helped me kind of get back into that different perspective that I could enjoy things again."
And he is. He was recently featured in a Geico commercial about a baby reveal.
He isn't the only former Michigan football player who has pursued an acting career. Fullback Jarrod Bunch (1989) played a boxer with huge ears in a Snickers commercial, afraid to come out of his locker room to fight Mike Tyson ... this just after Tyson bit a portion of Evander Holyfield's ear off in a fight.
Bunch also played boxer George Foreman in an HBO movie and has had several other roles.
Former punter Chris Stapleton, who played with Bunch, has also had several starring and supporting roles in movies. He was in The Bucket List with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, playing a parachute instructor. Freeman sat on his lap in one scene.
"Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson were great," he told us. "Brooke Shields was a blast, really a sweetheart. I had a scene where I was a guest star in the series Suddenly Susan. I play a cop, and she thinks I am a stripper sent by her friends for her birthday. It's really a cool scene … I saw her probably three or four years ago after we did that, and she remembered who I was and said she had put that scene on her reel.
"David Caruso, too, was great. I worked with him on CSI Miami."
We caught up with Stapleton in this 2008 interview: CHRIS STAPLETON.
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