An NBA Player With a New Frame of Reference

In his homeland of Romania, he’s known as Ghitza (pronounced GEET-za) or “Little Georgie.”

But the only thing small about Gheorghe Muresan, the 7-foot, 7-inch, 300-pound basketball-star-turned-actor, is his ego. Everything else, from his size 19 shoes to his Great Dane, Lucky, is larger than life.

Dressed in a custom-made black shirt and pants, perhaps to diminish (though unsuccessfully) his towering silhouette, Muresan unfolds out of a mid-sized, four-door sedan and lumbers through the vaulted doorways and under the 20-foot-plus ceilings of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. Hotel guests can’t help but react to the sight of him--from discreet raised eyebrows to teaspoons stopped in mid-stir to out-and-out gaping.

At first glance, his knock-kneed walk, sloped shoulders, prominent brow and elongated neck dwarf the physical dimensions of average-sized mortals. But his sorrowful eyes, ear-to-ear smile and soft, meaty handshake that feels like slapping palms with a catcher’s mitt of the richest leather, are appealingly human.

“I’m so sorry for being late, I apologize,” Muresan said several times in his thickly accented Slavic baritone. “I hate being late.”

Though he normally powers to the hoop for the Washington Wizards, Muresan, 27, the NBA’s tallest player, has not been able to play this season because of an injury once diagnosed as a damaged tendon in his right knee but now believed to be a pinched nerve in his back.

Instead, he’s taken a hiatus from shooting baskets to co-star in “My Giant,” a movie in which he plays the title role of Max, a huge Shakespeare-spouting caretaker of a remote Romanian monastery. Max is discovered by Sammy (Billy Crystal), a struggling talent agent. Sammy plans to bring Max to Hollywood to star in movies and save Sammy from the poorhouse and his own perceived inadequacies.

On the condition that Sammy will reunite Max with his long-beloved childhood crush, Lillianna, Max agrees to leave his isolated world of books and travel to America. There, he hopes to visit New Mexico, where he has been writing letters to Lillianna (Joanna Pacula) since she left Romania 20 years ago.

Even though this marks his feature-film debut and a drastic professional shift, Muresan will not concede that acting is more difficult than his regular day job.

“In the NBA, in a game, you cannot take one more chance to win that game. You need to, right there, do the best you can,” he said, as he scarfed down a pound of penne pasta in a rear dining room in the hotel. “In acting, you can take 20 takes to make better. In NBA, you can’t repeat anything.”

Paralleling the movie’s plot line, Crystal discovered Muresan almost by accident. When he saw the hoop star say, “I love this game,” in an NBA commercial, he thought Muresan would be perfect for the part.

“When we took him through the story, he couldn’t believe that he’d have to play a real person, and at times someone very close to himself,” Crystal said. “[Muresan] said, ‘I must do this. People should know about big people.’ ”

Remarkably for a first-time actor, Muresan’s portrayal gives Max a breadth of emotion that ultimately makes him the film’s most sympathetic character. An early review in Daily Variety highlighted Muresan’s performance as the film’s primary saving grace, touting him as “a calm, dignified and warm personality.”

“He’s so interesting and vulnerable and charming,” Crystal said. “And he breaks your heart with his honesty.”

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Usually most sports stars who turn to the silver screen seem plastic and two-dimensional. Yet Muresan spent several months working on his acting, adding nuance to his role. (Especially noteworthy is his recitation of several well-known soliloquies from Shakespeare.)

“We started very easy,” Muresan recalled. “In my off time, I would go over the lines, on the bus, on the plane. For the first time, it was pretty well hard because I don’t speak very well English.

“But after I started to understand the script better, it became much easier. I had a translator. I would go step by step through the script with [director] Michael Lehmann, David Seltzer, the writer. They showed me how I needed to do the movie and they would send me audiotapes with my role on the tapes. I would listen to it over and over again.”

Born in Triteni, Romania, Muresan is the youngest of six siblings of average height. (His father is 5-foot-9 and his mother 5-foot-7). But Muresan’s condition, a nonhereditary disease called acromegaly, developed from a benign tumor found in his pituitary gland as a teenager. The tumor stimulated his growth hormones. Though it was removed in 1993, he still takes medication to help control the growth hormone.

He was introduced to basketball at age 14 by his dentist, who also happened to be a basketball referee. At a gangly 6-foot-10, he went to school in France to develop his skills and, like Max, was ogled and ridiculed initially because of his gargantuan stature.

“It was not easy,” Muresan said. “I got teased in the school a lot, but I don’t pick up a lot. I try not to look at the bad things.”

Recruited by NBA scouts in 1993, he became the tallest player in American professional basketball for the then-Washington Bullets. Now, he lives in Washington, D.C., with his 6-foot-1 wife of four years, Lillianna. (They named the character in “My Giant” after her to make it easier for Muresan.)

“It was a big transition to come to the NBA after being in France. Being in France, I was able to visit a lot my family,” Muresan said. “The first three years were very hard. We missed a lot Romania. We missed a lot family, friends.”

Muresan has been able to adapt to American living quite well, though. A “sometimes listener” of rap and disco music, he has entered the homes of millions of Americans like many popular sports icons with a commercial contract with Snickers candy bars.

His wife is expecting a baby boy later this month, and Muresan said his son will also be named George, but with the American spelling. Since Muresan’s growth condition is not hereditary, it’s impossible to predict how tall the boy will be or whether he’ll play basketball.

“I’ll leave that up to him to make decision,” he said.

These days, Muresan doesn’t know if he’ll seek another acting role. Returning to play with his teammates is his main concern. “I’ll be back next season,” Muresan said. “I’m so happy what I do. My father said when I do something, after I finish, to be glad what I do. And I am.”

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Freelance writer Michael X. Ferraro contributed to this story.