By Nick Georgandis
How good was Andy Roddick’s wife Brookyln Decker in her three-episode guest role on FX’s The League?
So good I didn’t even realize it was her until the credits rolled on the end of the second episode.
With her hair colored a shade of auburn and shedding her nice girl attitude, Decker tore it up on the FX comedy that focuses on a group of guys (and a girl) who quest to destroy each other in fantasy football each year.
The League has had a bevy of professional football players cameo on the show, but Decker took on the role of a former high school classmate, recently divorced, who has a chance encounter with two of the guys at a shopping mall.
Pete, one of the show’s confirmed bachelors, had asked Decker’s character, Gina Gibiatti, to the prom when he was a senior and she a freshman. Rather than telling him no then and there, she instead takes him to the middle of the school cafeteria so she can humiliate him in front of a huge crowd.
Pete sees the chance encounter as a opportunity for revenge, fully intent on sleeping with Gina, then dumping her immediately after.
The problem is, Gina isn’t a very nice person, so Pete has to alter his personality accordingly, from pretending to enjoy watching two bums fight, to openly humiliating his friends.
As an actress, this is nothing short of a breakout role for Decker, first seen as Adam Sandler’s bombshell object of desire in “Just Go With It”. She played a bimbo in that movie, and one again in 2012’s “What toExpect When You’re Expecting,” but goes in a completely different direction on The League.
She’s foul-mouthed, cruel and very, very funny, completely unexpected given her normal sweet and playful personality.
“I’m a huge fan of The League so you can imagine the sick pleasure I got out of verbally abusing the cast,” Decker told Entertainment Weekly. “It’s actually frightening how easily I took to playing a horrible person.”
She’s at her finest at an expensive restaurant on a group date, when she goes off on a waiter for trying to act superior as he tells them the specials of the night.
“Don’t talk to us like you’re a professor at Hogwarts, OK?”
Hubby A-Rod coulda used a few more clever quips like that in some of his late career temper tantrums.