Marshawn Lynch is known for his football career but he switched things up a little bit after taking on a role in a comedy film about queer high school girls launching a fight club.
Marshawn Lynch’s sister, Marreesha Sapp-Lynch who is a lesbian recently spoke with PEOPLE explained why he brother felt like he needed to take on this film and add it to his growing acting resume. “From the beginning when he read the script, he said that I came to mind,” recalls Sapp-Lynch, 34. “I was like, ‘Most definitely you should do it.’ I just told him, ‘It’ll get you to understand, get more knowledge about the lesbian community.” Sapp-Lynch told the news outlet when she first came out in high school her mom was perfectly fine with it but her brothers had a different reaction. They were understanding, but they didn’t understand,” Sapp-Lynch tells PEOPLE. “Marshawn had a lot of questions and was thinking it was his fault: ‘What did I do?’ Because growing up he would always say I couldn’t have a boyfriend, ‘You can’t talk to boys.’ We’d go to a party and he’d be asking everybody, ‘Did you dance with my sister?’ But I wasn’t attracted to boys, so I didn’t dance with them!”
So when the film Bottoms, a comedy produced by Amazon’s Orion Pictures and Elizabeth Banks’ came his way the former football player felt like this was a way he could right his wrongs for the way he treated his sister growing up. “In his words, he said he wasn’t amazing about it when Marreesha came out in high school and that he felt like this was the universe giving him a chance to right his wrongs,” she adds. “He made it seem like that was really what was interesting him the most about it.”
Her brother has accepted and celebrated her sexual orientation since those teenage years though, Sapp-Lynch says. In more recent years Marshawn helped plan her 2021 wedding and walked her down the aisle.
“I asked him to walk me down the aisle because our dad passed away,” says Sapp-Lynch with a smile. “He cried the whole time,” she adds.
“He doesn’t cry — or I don’t see him cry. The fact that he did cry and shed some tears, it meant a lot to me.” (Marshawn was so invested in his sister’s wedding, in fact, he urged the pair to reschedule it from 2023 to 2021. “He was very much involved in the whole planning… He called us at 5:00 a.m. talking about the cake designs and party favors.”)