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Travis Kelce may want to watch his back … at least, in the fictional world of Peacock’s Based on a True Story.
The Kansas City Chiefs tight end, 35, was name-dropped in season 2 of the dark comedy thriller series starring Kaley Cuoco, Chris Messina and Tom Bateman, which premiered on the streaming service on Thursday, November 21. Ava (played by Kaley, 38) and Matt (Tom, 35) receive a clue from the Copycat Killer and attempt to decipher it, with Matt noticing that it mentions a “chief.”
“He’s targeting the chief of police? What other chief?” Ava asks before repeating “chief” over and over. Finally, she thinks she has something.
“He’s going to kill Travis Kelce!” she says with a gasp.
Travis does not appear in Based on a True Story season 2, and thankfully, he turns out to not be on the killer’s list of targets after all. The victims are connected through the medical world, so the NFL star doesn’t fit the mold.
Based on a True Story, which first premiered on Peacock in 2023, follows Ava and husband Nathan (Chris, 50) as they team up with serial killer Matt to start a true crime podcast focusing on Matt’s “work” as the notorious and uncaught West Side Ripper. The murders continue in season 2, but Matt — who found love with Ava’s sister, Tory (Liana Liberato) — swears that he’s quit killing cold turkey. There’s a West Side Ripper copycat on the loose, but can Ava, Nathan and Matt find them and stop them?
While Travis, who reached a new level of stardom amid his romance with Taylor Swift, did not take on an acting gig in Based on a True Story, he did recently appear in another serial killer show — FX’s Grotesquerie. He made his acting debut as a flirty hospital orderly named Eddie, starring alongside Niecy Nash. The finale aired on October 30.
“I was kinda blown away and kinda, like, shocked that [series creator Ryan Murphy] was willing to give me a role like this, because it is a big role on the show,” Travis said on his “New Heights” podcast in May. “He seemed very confident that I’d be able to do this and he kinda injected that in me the first conversation that we had. So hopefully I don’t bomb this for him.”
Later, in a behind-the-scenes video from Grotesquerie, Travis shared how he got into character. “I flip the switch like I would if I was going out on the football field and just getting into the zone,” he explained.
Though it was his first time playing a role on television, Travis’ costars had nothing but kind things to say about him and his acting skills. “He was very wonderful,” Courtney B. Vance gushed. “He was just good, and if he needed some help, he was open.”
“The blessing about this particular show for an actor is that most of the characters play a duality,” Niecy, 54, told Us Weekly. “Travis went from being a charming person who worked at the hospital to being down and out on his luck guy who has a mullet.”
She continued, “I just wanted to make sure I was very, very present for him in this new space. [He was] coming into the acting world and was just getting baptized in [the acting world] real quick. [Grotesquerie] is going to come with some things that maybe other shows don’t present so I just wanted to make sure he felt covered. I wanted to make sure we had time to rehearse.”
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