Former Highlanders baller turns “Semi-Pro”

(NOTE: This article appeared in the Piedmont Post on 26 March 2008.)

Peter Cornell, a Piedmont native and Highlanders basketball center back in the early 90's, has never given up his dream of making it to the big leagues. Since finishing up his college ball at Loyola-Marymount in 1998, Cornell has done his time in minor and foreign leagues. The quintessential journeyman, he played ball for Partizan Belgrade in Yugoslavia, the Honka Playboys in Finland, the North Charleston Lowgators in South Carolina, the Fukuoka Red Falcons in Japan and many other international and domestic teams. It has taken years of effort and countless frequent flier miles, but Cornell has finally made it. In 2007 he landed a supporting role with the Flint Tropics, playing alongside such stars as André Benjamin, Woody Harrelson and Will Ferrell. That's right, Cornell has made the big leagues on the silver screen.

In "Semi-Pro," the new Will Ferrell movie, Cornell plays the role of Vakidis, a laconic and bewildered but athletic giant from a "weird country called Lithuania." Vakidis is a peripheral character, and Cornell has only a couple of speaking parts in the film, each of them limited to three words, the extent of Vakidis' English vocabulary: "Yes. Right on."

The pivotal moment for Vakidis is when he sinks a game-winning basket for the Tropics that costs the penny-pinching Tropic's player/GM Jackie Moon – played by Ferrell – several thousand corndogs.

Without question, Cornell's first love is basketball. Being 6'11", determined and talented has helped him land roster spots with 27 different professional and semi-professional teams around the world, but he has appeared in almost twice as many television commercials, almost always as a basketball player, though he has moonlighted as "axe murderer" and "passenger." He appeared in commercials opposite such basketball greats as Shaquille O'Neal, Kobe Bryant, Duane Wade and Dick "It's awesome, baby" Vitale. Doing commercials helped supplement Cornell's income, and gave him the financial support to continue pursuing his basketball career.

Cornell even has an Internet Movie Database entry. He has an agent in LA, and a publicist in West Hollywood. His physique is athletic, his age range is 24-34. He shared screen time with Brendan Fraser in Bedazzled (2000) and L'il Bow Wow and Crispin Glover in Like Mike (2002). But when they were offered, movie roles always came around during the basketball season, and while the paycheck from movies and commercials was pretty healthy, Cornell didn't want to sideline his primary ambition.

Cornell spent the last four years playing in Australia, and after finishing the '06-'07 season with the West Sydney Razorbacks, he returned to the Northern Hemisphere and read for the part of Vakidis. He was offered the role and took it because it wouldn't interfere with basketball. He quickly found that filming a movie was no easy task.

"Honestly, it was one of the most difficult times in my life," said Cornell, speaking from his residence in Los Angeles. "We spent 17 hours a day, six days a week, for three months working on the movie. I had a bout of walking pneumonia I was so exhausted. It was very fun, but very tough at the same time."

To look the part of a Stahlinistic Lithuanian basketball player, Cornell wore a Caesar wig and a push-broom mustache. For inspiration, he used his own experience as an intercontinental athlete who was sometimes totally befuddled by a foreign culture. It also helped that Cornell is of Yugoslavian heritage, that he traveled there when he was younger, and actually played two seasons in Eastern Europe.

"I grew up with some bad-ass Serbians around me. They were very stoic, and they looked like they were ruling the world even though they didn't know what was going on, so I was definitely able to size-up that vibe."

During his first season in Japan, Cornell wasn't appointed a translator, and he was as lost in translation as Vakidis is in "Semi-Pro." To properly portray the character as he was instructed, all Cornell had to do was tune out and ignore what was going on around him. His experience had so prepared him for this that the director approached him after a couple days and complimented Cornell on his performance.

Since the release of "Semi-Pro," Cornell has coached Ferrell and other celebrities in the NBA Entertainment league. He also landed the role of George Mikan in the upcoming film "Sweetwater," about Nathaniel Clifton, the first African-American player signed to the NBA. He hopes to return to Japan this summer to play for the Hitachi Sunrockers, finish up his basketball career there and eventually transition into sports broadcasting. Cornell will also take film roles as they come, but he doesn't foresee that becoming the focus of his professional life: "I could be a good character actor, but it depends. Unless they start casting giants in regular dramas, there just aren't that many roles out there for me."