Its not a surprise to me at all: Devale Ellis NFL life was brief, but his show business

The very first moment of the very first practice of Devale Ellis’ NFL career remains imprinted in his memory.

Every rookie has their “welcome to the NFL moment.” Ellis’ arrived with all the subtlety of an open-handed slap in the face.

“I remember the first time I got in the huddle,” said Ellis, a former Lions wide receiver. “(Quarterback) Jon Kitna was like, ‘Trips right, motion, scat right, 525, F post, swing!’ I was like, ‘Jesus! You gotta be kidding me! I gotta know every word in this playbook?’ It was as thick as the Bible.”

It’s enough to make a young player wonder whether he even belongs. That’s likely true for most prospects, but particularly for one who had to scratch and claw just to earn a spot as a tryout candidate in a rookie minicamp — the longest of long shots.

This is a guy who played college football for a school (Hofstra) that no longer fields a team. His own coaches in Detroit didn’t even know his name when he first arrived.

But there he was, trying to decipher what in the world that string of gibberish delivered in the huddle by his quarterback even meant.

These days, Ellis finds himself in a different sort of huddle with a much different quarterback.

Director Tyler Perry works at a similar cadence to an NFL team. And his playbook is of comparable size.

When Ellis and his fellow cast members began shooting the BET series “Sistas,” he immediately had a flashback to those moments in Detroit in 2006.

“It was almost like being back in training camp,” he said. “They threw 25 episodes at us and said, ‘OK, we’re going to film 25 episodes in three weeks.’ I was like, ‘What? Is this a joke?’

“It was the same moment: Trips right, motion, scat right, 525, F post, swing. I gotta learn all of this? So, I was up late at night studying, preparing myself, meeting with my castmates. It just reminded me of my camp experience. I have three weeks to make a mark and if my character doesn’t make a mark, I know next (season) I won’t get as much (airtime). People won’t like the character and you won’t be back.”

You can spend a lifetime chasing a dream. Ellis had the audacity to pursue two and now is living his dream for the second time.

Ellis, in 2006, squaring off against the Jets at the Meadowlands (Tom Berg / NFLPhotoLibrary)

Fifteen years later, Chad Henry is still telling the inspiring story to tryout prospects. He tells them that they, too, can beat the odds, that they can do what no one believes they can.

He tells them about Ellis.

“I’ll always remember him,” Henry says.

Henry, currently a Colts area scout, was with the Lions when Ellis landed a spot in the team’s 2006 rookie minicamp. They promised him nothing but a place to sleep, three square meals and an opportunity — however small.

To be perfectly honest, Ellis shouldn’t even have been there. He was never on Detroit’s radar. The team didn’t even offer him an invitation to the three-day camp. Ellis was granted the final spot exclusively on the basis of his agent calling in a favor from Martin Mayhew, then a Detroit personnel executive.

“I get Martin on the phone,” Art Weiss recounted. “I say, ‘Look, I’ve got this kid. And don’t tell me you know who he is because I know you don’t. He’s from Hofstra. You know I’ve had a lot of guys from there and they all were worthy of a look. I said, I guarantee you, just bring him into the rookie camp. Don’t even worry about the flight. I’ll pay for his airfare. But if you like Wayne Chrebet, you’re gonna like this guy.’”

Weiss had discovered and represented Chrebet, the former Jets standout and the pride of the Hofstra program, so he had earned some credibility. Still, here he was making some pretty ridiculous promises about a 174-pound receiver Mayhew had never heard of.

“I said, ‘I guarantee you, if you bring him on Friday, you’ll be calling me on Sunday to sign him,’” Weiss said. “There was a pregnant pause and he says, ‘Really?’”

Mayhew bought it. Off to Detroit Ellis went, an anonymous prospect with no intention of remaining one.

“Art told me, ‘Look, there’s no guarantees. Just go in there and make a splash,’” Ellis said. “I said, ‘If I go, I’m coming back with a contract.’ Art said they had three first-round picks at receiver, and I said, ‘I don’t care.’”

The more you learn about Ellis, the more you discover that audacity is an integral part of his story. He’s never lacked it, even if he might have had conspicuous shortages in other areas (like size).

Just ask Marques Colston, Ellis’ Hofstra teammate who went on to become a star receiver for the Saints.

“He told me flat out that he was going to take my job when he got to Hofstra,” Colston said of Ellis. “It was a really interesting way to meet.”

Eventually, the two became close and remain so today. They shared some key characteristics.

“We were all at a small school and we had that chip on our shoulder,” Colston said. “He was willing to put in the work.”

To that end, Weiss ultimately was validated. His phone rang on Day 3 of the rookie camp, early on a Sunday morning. It was Mayhew.

“Art, you were right,” he said. “We wanna sign him. That kid’s pretty dang good.”

Ellis, now 37, went on to make the team’s final roster that fall, appearing in nine games as a rookie. He’d gone from undrafted to the active roster. But making it to the NFL is really just the beginning of one’s football career. Ellis soon learned this.

A knee injury in 2007 derailed his second season. In the process, he developed an addiction to pain pills that proved difficult to shake.

“It wasn’t like I liked to get high,” Ellis said. “But I needed those pills to feel like I could function. It got to the point where I realized I had an addiction and I had to cut all medications off. I was taking, just to get through practice, four Tylenol in the morning, four Tylenol before practice, four Tylenol after practice and two Vicodin to go to sleep at night. And I was doing that every day. I realized I just couldn’t do that anymore.”

Ellis said he eventually weaned himself off the pills. But the challenges kept coming. Ellis missed the final roster cut in 2008 when the Lions opted to keep just four receivers. Then the Browns cut him in the summer of 2009.

Just like that, his career was at a crossroads. It’s a point every football player inevitably reaches, but how each confronts the moment can vary. Some persist, willing to endure the tryout circuit hoping to land a job when the rare open roster spot comes along.

But not Ellis. He decided he was done. Besides, he had a plan.

It was time to pursue his next dream.

When she first got the phone call, Adriane Lenox was taken aback.

Ellis had grown up in Brooklyn, N.Y., attending the same church as Lenox, and their families remained close. Lenox had always associated Ellis with football. Now, the young man who referred to her as Aunt Adriane was seeking advice on how to initiate a very different kind of career.

“He was in Detroit playing football, then next thing I know he’s calling me about this,” Lenox said.

But Ellis had come to the right place. Lenox is a Tony Award-winning actress who has enjoyed a long career on stage, film and television. She’s appeared in everything from Broadway’s “Dreamgirls” and “Doubt” to feature films like “The Blind Side.”

“I had this audition for a commercial, so I took him with me,” Lenox recalled. “I told him maybe he could see what the process is. So, I saw the casting director and I introduced Devale. You see a lot of commercials (during) football. I said, ‘Well, you’re a football player. Maybe you can do something like that.’ So, that’s how he got started.”

Ellis later connected with a talent agency. They liked his look and his persona. They scheduled him for a few auditions. Here he was a long shot once more. The agents had not even decided whether to take him on as a client because, well, they couldn’t be sure he was worth their time. That decision would be based on how he fared in auditions.

Yet, though he had no right, Ellis again tapped into the same audaciousness that had served him well in football.

“I said, ‘I’m gonna go in there and crush this audition,’” Ellis said. “They were like, ‘Yeah, right.’ Well, I went in there and I got a callback. So, out of 400 people, I made it to the top five. That was pretty good. They liked the fact that I went in there and made an impression, so they kept me as a client and I ended up booking seven national commercials that year. I got a manager, started looking at some co-star roles and the rest is history.”

But like in any field as competitive as acting, the path has not been linear. If there’s one thing actors know well, it’s the feeling of being rejected.

Take it from Aunt Adriane.

“You’re basically hearing, ‘no, no, no’ all the time,” Lenox said. “The line they say all the time is, ‘We’re going a different way. You were excellent, but we’re going a different way.’”

But, really, this isn’t new for Ellis. Because the moment you play one snap in the NFL, you’ve already beaten the odds.

“The shift to entertainment, he knew it was going to take a while, but the journey that he went on through football prepared him for the journey through entertainment,” Colston said. “A lot of it is being prepared when the opportunity presents itself, not knowing when the opportunity is going to come.”

In acting, for every breakthrough you make, another 10 doors might close in your face. That’s the business. If it were easy, anyone could do it. But the successes make it worthwhile.

And Ellis has increasingly enjoyed more of those. He’s appeared in a number of television series, including “Gotham,” “Power,” “The Blacklist,” “NCIS” and “The Equalizer.”

“Having to deal with all those no’s, it taught me that other people are not going to see my dream,” Ellis said. “They’re not going to see my vision. What I wanted to do, less than 1 percent of the population does. So, I got used to people saying no because it really is unrealistic to do the things that I’m doing. Hearing no from people who live in a realistic realm, that’s OK. They don’t see what I’m capable of. But that doesn’t stop me from being able to do it.”

With each opportunity comes a dose of education. Football is a craft. Acting is an art. In both, growth must remain constant.

Working on “Sistas” has been good for Ellis in this regard. He portrays Zac, the former love interest of one of the show’s main stars. Playing a permanent character allows Ellis to display more of his acting chops and to bring more of a personality to the role. And in some ways, Ellis might be the ideal actor to play this particular character.

“Zac is a young man who has dealt with recidivism because he’s been in and out of the prison system because of petty crimes,” Ellis said. “He’s trying to figure out how to be better in his life. And I can relate to Zac, because he’s a guy who knows he wants something but doesn’t know how to get it. And he’s just grinding. He’s a super-hard worker and no one is going to tell him no. He’s going to find a way.

“I can relate because, in my late 20s when I had retired from the NFL, I told people I was retiring because I wanted to do TV. People laughed, made smart comments. Even my dad was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ People didn’t understand me at the time, the same way they don’t understand Zac. You get to watch him on this journey as he starts to accomplish his goals and change people’s minds about what he is and what he’s doing.”

The Season 2 debut of the show in October had more than 1 million viewers, and the series was recently renewed for a third season. Zac’s character also continues to become more significant in the storyline.

And Ellis is growing right along with him. As is another side of his career on social media.

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A post shared by Devale Ellis (@iamdevale)

Ellis is gathered in the basement — aka the man cave — with his three sons. Now, they’re huddling and Ellis is asking them to repeat after him.

“I make a pact,” he says, as the boys repeat, “to be quiet. Whatever happens here, stays here. Because Mommy ain’t here.”

This is definitely a no-snitch zone. Ellis then instructs his boys to grab a couple of sodas from the minifridge. His wife, Khadeen, doesn’t allow soda. But this is the man cave and Devale makes the rules here (until Khadeen arrives and overrules him, as is often the case).

This scenario was captured in a recent four-minute video Ellis posted on his social networks and is illustrative of the kind of sketch that introduced him and his family to most who now know their names.

You can find hours of role-playing clips from “The Ellises” on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, where they have a combined following of more than 3 million.

Devale and Khadeen have a knack for bringing levity to the real challenges we all face at home, anything from squabbles about counter space in the master bathroom to who gets the privilege of disciplining the kids.

Most watch, laugh, then keep scrolling. But for Ellis, his online endeavors have always been very serious business. He was and is building a brand. And the purpose of doing so is about more than gaining social-media clout.

The Ellises have leveraged their massive following, creating a popular, Webby Award-winning podcast, “Dead Ass,” which discusses topics that range from race to relationships. They’ve also ventured into publishing, releasing a popular children’s book, authored by Devale titled, “The Ellises and the Time Machine: Why Do We Have to Say Black Lives Matter?”

And the family is at the center of it all, whether as the subject of many of the podcast episodes to most of the videos they post.

That’s intentional. Ellis is proud of the fact that he can project positive images of the Black family, something he believes is lacking in popular media. It’s why Ellis said he has had a negative reaction to overtures he’s received about doing a potential reality show, because of fears that such conflict-driven shows would clash with what he wants to portray.

“He’s rooted in his family,” Colston said. “It’s not a surprise to me at all to see him bring that to the forefront of what he’s doing, because that’s what he’s about.”

Ellis has big goals. He wants to create his own show at some point. He has visions of having his own production company, too. He’s learning about the importance of ownership from Perry, having had deep discussions about the business side of the industry with the self-made media mogul.

“He’s the epitome of the little guy breaking into the industry and doing it his own way,” Ellis said.

Before he built a billion-dollar empire, there were likely those who doubted Perry. You might say he was audacious.

Ellis prefers to describe him as a guy who had a dream and pursued it. He knows a little something about that himself.

(Top photo: Ellis, his wife Khadeen and their children/ Credit: Joshua Dwain)

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