Winning Time’s Hadley Robinson Wants to Do Jeanie Buss Justice

Hadley Robinson has never met Jeanie Buss, and certainly not the Jeanie Buss of the ’70s and ’80s, which is when we meet the character in Winning Time, the Adam McKay-led HBO drama chronicling the rise of the era’s Showtime Lakers. But Robinson, the actress behind Winning Time’s Jeanie, didn’t think she needed to meet the real-life woman to understand her: In Jeanie, she recognized some of her own ferocity. As Moxie and Little Woman actress Robinson put it, the character has “this bubbly personality, but there’s something beneath it.” Robinson, who speaks with the intertwining warmth and intensity of an ambitious millennial 20-something, could relate.

Currently the controlling owner and president of the Los Angeles Lakers, Buss has yet to comment about the show on the record. (A 2019 interview with Claire Rothman, former general manager and vice president of the Lakers arena The Forum, suggests Buss wasn’t thrilled with the series: “I certainly respected Jeanie, whose opinion it was not to cooperate [with HBO],” she revealed. “And she sent me the script, which they had sent to her. Only the first episode. And she thought I would get a kick out of it.”) While Robinson has no need for praise from the Lakers legend, she nevertheless hopes to do the real woman justice. As a young woman in an overwhelmingly male-dominated front office, led by the likes of her affable but womanizing father Dr. Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly), she stages a slow but steady battle that leads directly to the owner’s seat.

“Hopefully,” Robinson says, “she’d see herself as the hero [of the show].”

Ahead, the actress discusses the unique challenge of playing a living person, the powerful but (at times) peculiar relationship between Jeanie and her father, and the future of her involvement in the HBO series.

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW AT ELLE.COM

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