In any profession on this Earth, one thing remains constant: you truly never know where the next gig is going to take you. While Terry Crews doesn’t have a film on the 2025 movie schedule, he will be a part of 2026’s Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie. And if you rewind the tape on this Crews’ path to stardom to the start, you’d see that it all pretty much came from a role in one of the best 2000s movies of all time: the Denzel Washington cop drama Training Day.
Don’t be dismayed if you don’t readily remember the Brooklyn Nine-Nine fixture in director Antoine Fuqua’s 2001 Academy Award winner. As Crews himself admitted in his story on The Kelly Clarkson Show, appearing in a short, but pivotal scene was a pretty huge moment. But before the industry took notice, a very special spectator highlighted its importance:
I remember when I was an extra in Training Day, I was an extra. But the scene that kind of took over was a big scene between just me and Denzel…. And what it was, it was in the Academy Awards, and they showed me and Denzel at the Academy Awards. I was an extra. My mother was like, ‘You won an Oscar!’ I was like, ‘No, no.’
Being an extra, or even a bit player, in a major franchise can be quite the discovery later down the line. (Just ask Elijah Wood about his Back to the Future: Part II scene.) But when you’re playing an extra in one of the most quotable moments from a film like Training Day, it hits differently.
With that in mind, check out Terry Crews’ extra work, and Denzel Washington’s iconic delivery, below:
Whoever cast this America’s Got Talent hype man in Training Day‘s “King Kong” scene deserves an Oscar themselves. Even if you didn’t recognize Crews as the name he is today, his presence just behind Mr. Washington is quite notable. As he continued his story, Terry Crews backed that very call, running down a chain of opportunities everyone should know:
I stood out. And, all of a sudden, I’ll never forget, Ice Cube saw me in that movie and put me in Friday After Next, which put me in White Chicks, which put me in The Longest Yard. And it started to grow. [Sofia Vergara] and I did Soul Plane years ago, you know what I mean. But that was because I was an extra in Training Day. The people saw Training Day, and they put me in Soul Plane. It’s amazing how this all happened.
Just think, if Terry Crews wasn’t present for Detective Alonzo Harris’ downfall, he wouldn’t have been serenading a Wayans Brother running undercover in prosthetics. Come to think of it, maybe both of these projects helped Crews land in the Brooklyn Nine-Nine roster. While one can never be sure, in a world where anything can (and does) happen, the possibilities are endless. So maybe that hypothetical White Chicks 2 the Wayans are still up for could get off the ground after all.