‘The Game’ star Hosea Chanchez says he is ‘absolutely retired’ from acting

Chanchez says his identity was once deeply tied to booking roles, but his relationship with the industry has changed.

Hosea Chanchez has been retired from acting for a while. Nobody knew because he had never said it out loud.

The 45-year-old made the admission on Cam Newton’s “Funky Friday” podcast, where Newton asked him directly. “I would definitely say I’m retired,” Chanchez said. “I just never said it publicly. That’s the thing. I’ve never said it to anybody, but I’m absolutely retired.”

Chanchez played star quarterback Malik Wright on the hit show, “The Game” across the series’ full run, from 2006 to 2009, again from 2011 to 2015, and through the reboot that ended in 2023. What followed, by his account, was not what he expected.

“I thought that once I was done with that job, there would be a safety net to catch me from my community,” he said. He described studying how Will Smith and Denzel Washington moved between projects and observing what he called an unspoken net underneath them. He assumed the same structure would be waiting.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Funky Friday (@funkyfriday)

The harder part was psychological. “My identity as an actor was tied to me working and my identity as a human was tied to me being an actor,” he said. “And so if I wasn’t working, then I felt worthless.”

That calculation has changed over the past three years, which he attributes to building something of his own. Chanchez now runs The Dawn of Good, a health and wellness company, and described the shift in practical terms. “I’m a businessman now,” he said. “I can’t just take a break to go book a job, even if Denzel’s giving it to me.”

He stopped short of severing the identity entirely. Asked whether he still considers himself an actor, Chanchez said he always will be, but that his relationship to the industry has changed.

He also traced the ambition to its origin, recalling knowing at five years old in Alabama that he wanted to act without any framework for understanding what that meant. The same determination that got him there, he argued, transfers to whatever comes next.

His comments arrive shortly after he reunited with Tia Mowry, Pooch Hall, Brittany Daniel, Wendy Raquel Robinson and Coby Bell to mark the show’s 20th anniversary.