Former NFL Player Devale Ellis Opens Up About New Rom-Com, Plans to Win an Oscar and How His Kids Humble Him (Exclusive)

• Former professional athlete Devale Ellis transitioned from the NFL to the entertainment industry more than a decade ago
• The star of Tyler Perry’s series Sistas and Zatima now appears in the Netflix rom-com Meet Me Next Christmas
• Ellis and his wife Khadeen, the parents of four sons, also host a podcast and share a behind-the-scenes look at their lives on YouTube

Devale Ellis has the résumé of someone who has lived several lives: The former NFL player, who transitioned into entertainment more than a decade ago, is not only a TV and movie actor, but a podcaster, YouTube personality, New York Times bestselling author and Broadway producer too.

“My schedule’s a little crazy,” admits the Atlanta-based father of four. A little? That’s an understatement.

“I don’t go to bed until about 2, 3 in the morning. That’s my most creative time. I can write, I can get on the phone and do things with people on the west coast because they’re still up,” he continues.

Ellis doesn’t believe in the old cliché “the early bird gets the worm.” By his telling, the night owl gets the world. 

His hustling has paid off handsomely. Ellis, who looks at least a decade younger than his 40 years, currently stars on two TV series, BET’s Sistas and BET+’s Zatima, and he’s a lead in the new Netflix romantic comedy Meet Me Next Christmas.

In the heartwarming holiday film, he plays a ticket concierge helping a high-powered exec (played by Christina Milian) get into a sold-out Pentatonix concert so she can meet up with the dreamy guy she met a year prior. 

With the movie, Ellis says he found his sweet spot. “I love rom-coms. I’m naturally silly. I love being funny, I love love.”

He also has an affinity for the leading men of the genre. “I love Ryan Reynolds. I love Matt McConaughey. Hitch is one of my favorite movies,” he says, referencing the 2005 Will Smith hit. “Watching those men transition from doing rom-coms to doing more in-depth films is what I ultimately want to do as well.”

His dream role? “I want to play LL Cool J in his biopic,” says Ellis. “I’m a huge LL Cool J fan. I’m from New York. I understand his journey and his grind. I watched him go from ‘Mama Said Knock You Out,’ all the way to Deep Blue Sea. I watched him [go] from a rapper to a thespian, and I think that I could do the role justice. I think that that’s going to be the role that I win an Oscar [for].”

Ellis — one of three kids raised by his parents Troy and Karen — knew from a young age growing up in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn that he wanted to act. “In a way, I always saw this for myself,” he says. 

His dad, who worked at a bank and did security for clubs on weekends, ran a mentorship program for young men and showed them a bootleg copy of Boyz n the Hood, the 1992 John Singleton coming-of-age drama set in Los Angeles. 

“I saw how captivated the audience was,” recalls Ellis. “And I said, ‘I want that power to be able to captivate an audience.’ ”

But he pursued sports instead. “There was no path for the arts as a young Black man. It’s just like in the ’90s everyone was, in a way, I would say not hip to the way the world is now,” explains Ellis. 

“Just to be quite frank, homophobia ran rampant in the ’90s, especially in urban areas. So being a part of the arts wasn’t looked at as something a young Black man was supposed to be a part of,” he continues. 

“I wanted to get out of Brooklyn, so I said sports could be my way to get out of Brooklyn. I said, ‘If I can get a scholarship to go to school, I might get my degree, I can get a brownstone in Brooklyn. I don’t have to be a starving artist, and then I can go back home and work on my craft.’ That was the plan, and that’s what I was able to do,” says Ellis.

He played football and studied communications and performance at Hofstra University, where he met his now-wife (and podcast co-host) Khadeen, whom Ellis affectionately calls “my person.”

After college, Ellis was briefly signed to the Cleveland Browns, then the Detroit Lions, but he was cut in the summer of 2009. While many athletes would be devastated, Ellis saw it as an opportunity to pursue his original dream: a career in entertainment.

Ellis — who’d lost all his savings in the stock market crash of 2008 and his $500,000-a-year NFL salary — and Khadeen moved back in with his family in Brooklyn while they regrouped. Khadeen had worked as a makeup artist previously, and supported them while Ellis studied at the Esper Studio, a New York acting conservatory.

“I learned so much about the craft. It was a great opportunity,” says Ellis, who began to get work in the industry, landing bit parts in TV shows like Gotham and The Mysteries of Laura, and behind the scenes in Power as Omari Hardwick’s body double. 

“I’m a student of the game more than anything else,” he says.

But Ellis wasn’t getting the types of parts he really wanted. “I only got offered the same role all the time: it was a gangbanger, it was the drug dealer, it was the guy in the lineup,” says Ellis. “I said, ‘In order for them to see me differently, they have to see me differently.’”

To that end, he and Khadeen — who share sons Jackson, 13, Kairo, 8, Kaz, 7, and Dakota, 3 — began filming YouTube segments, showing behind-the-scenes glimpses of their life as parents.

The videos — like clips of Ellis and Khadeen visiting Hofstra, where they met, or talking about one of their sons peeing on the toilet seat — became wildly popular, garnering hundreds of thousands of views and earning them recognition from all around the world. 

“I have fans from the Netherlands, from Nigeria, from Asia,” says Ellis. “They send me messages like, ‘I’ve never seen an American dad like this, be so involved, but be funny and be sexy with his wife.’ I’m just a regular person like everyone else.”

Maybe not everyone else. He and Khadeem have since launched a podcast, Dead Ass with K&E (Joe Biden was a guest in 2020 when he was running for president) and wrote a New York Times bestseller, We Over Me, which gives an intimate look at their relationship.

Over the years, the Ellises have faced financial struggles, his reliance on pain pills following a knee injury during his time in the NFL, and her life-threatening battle with postpartum preeclampsia.

But, says Ellis, “There’s nothing that we can’t discuss and get through. It’s just that simple. If you want to be somewhere and you want to be with someone who wants to be with you, there’s nothing you can’t get through.”

Together, they are building what Ellis calls an “empire,” while learning from billionaire Tyler Perry, who cast the actor as the complicated Zac Taylor in his juicy BET series Sistas in 2019. Three years later, Ellis got a spinoff, Zatima, on BET+. 

“Working with Tyler has been a master class,” says Ellis. But no matter how much success he has, his boys always keep him humble.

“Right now I’m cool because I’m on TV, but I’m not cool because I played in the NFL and I never scored a touchdown. So my kids are like, ‘You’re not an athlete. We don’t want to hear it. What are your stats?’ ” he says with a laugh. “It’s harsh, but kids will be honest with you.”

Ellis will likely get more cool points with the kids next year when Othello — the Shakespeare play he’s co-producing — opens on Broadway with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead roles. “I’m excited,” says Ellis, who has yet to meet the stars. “I’m going to compose myself when I do.”

He’s eager to see what the future holds, no matter how it looks. 

“There’s no book on life. We’re all trying to figure it out. I’m trying to figure it out the right way while balancing being a father and a husband and a businessman,” says Ellis. “It’s scary, but it is invigorating.”

Meet Me Next Christmas is on Netflix Nov. 6.