Working with your idols! Maxwell Simkins and Tait Blum grew up watching Taylor Lautner movies before sharing the screen with the Twilight star in the Netflix movie Home Team.

“It was crazy, I’m not gonna lie. I didn’t know Taylor Lautner was the same guy that was in [The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl],” Maxwell told J-14 exclusively about working with the actor. “I’m not gonna lie. Taylor, you look much different. You look chiseled, than chiseled, than even more chiseled. He looks different, but the same in every single project, you know what I mean? He’s one of those people that when you see them in person, you’re like, ‘Oh, my God.’ But on the screen, you’re like, ‘Wait is that … ?’ So, Oh, my God. It was, it was crazy. He’s such a funny, nice guy. He was like that super cool uncle everyone has.”

Home Team — which premiered via Netflix on Friday, January 28 — inspired by the story of New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton. Taylor stars as Troy Lambert while Maxwell and Tait play Paulie and Connor Payton, respectively. Maxwell told J-14 that he didn’t have much football experience before nabbing a role in the film and was surprised when it came to filming the game sequences.

“Tait, he’s a machine,” The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers star joked about his costar. “I, at least at that time, was a lot slower, a lot fatigued, I guess you can say. So when they were all these guys were running super fast, I’d be the last … all the way in the back. … It was hard because it was a lot more running than it seems like on TV.”

Taylor Lautner Was a 'Super Cool Uncle' to 'Home Team' Costars Maxwell Simkins and Tait Blum
SCOTT YAMANO/NETFLIX

Tait, for his part, “followed football pretty closely” but never really played the game.

“I’ve been a football fan for pretty much my whole life. I played a lot of flag football prior to Home Team,” the actor explained. “I hadn’t been able to play tackle because I’m acting and if I got hurt that’d be a very bad thing for me. But overall, I’ve loved football for a long time and I’ve played quite a bit of flag.”

So, when it came time to film their practice drills, the actor had a “funny” moment with Taylor, who ended up knocking Tait to the ground.

“We were shooting a football montage where all the players were running drills. … At the end, Taylor was holding a pad that you had to hit — it was a blocking pad. They were rolling, they had the other kids go in front of me. There were, maybe, two or three other kids in front of me that ran their drills,” Tait recalled. “They went through it really quickly, easy peasy. Then, there’s my turn. … It came up to Taylor and I went and I lowered the shoulder thinking, it’d just be kinda like a faux hit, a fake hit — fake it for the screen — but he completely put me on my butt. He hit me so hard with that pad.”

The Netflix star added, “I had no clue he was gonna hit that hard. I thought we’d be faking it. … It was the real deal. It was a 100 percent,” noting that Taylor went up to him and apologized.

Home Team is now streaming on Netflix.

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