'Acting, Being an Entertainer' Impacted NFL Performance

Travis Kelce is getting candid about balancing the NFL with his burgeoning entertainment career, telling GQ in a new cover story that the “past two years” of his football performance “haven’t been to my standard.”

Reflecting on his team, the Kansas City Chiefs, losing the Super Bowl to the Philadelphia Eagles in February, Kelce said: “I think it might have slipped a little bit because I did have a little bit more focus in trying to set myself up. And opportunities came up where I was excited to venture into a new world of acting and being an entertainer.”

Indeed, Kelce just appeared in “Happy Gilmore 2” alongside Adam Sandler and had a role in Ryan Murphy’s “Grotesquerie” series last year. He’s also started a hosting gig for Amazon’s “Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity?” and hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 2023.

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“I don’t say this as ‘I shouldn’t have done it,'” Kelce continued of his entertainment ventures. “I’m just saying that my work ethic is such that I have so much pride in how I do things that I never want the product to tail off, and I feel like these past two years haven’t been to my standard.”

He added, “I just have such a motivation to show up this year for my guys.”

As for his future in showbiz, Kelce said: “I don’t necessarily know if I’ll take it and run with it when I’m done playing. But I know that I want to stay around the football world as a profession and then dabble in other areas as well.”

Kelce’s relationship with pop star Taylor Swift has also drawn significant media attention, with the singer showing up to many of the Chiefs’ games and even announcing her new album on Kelce’s “New Heights” podcast on Monday. Despite all the eyes on them, Kelce told GQ: “Whenever I’m with her, we’re just regular people.”

“When there is not a camera on us, we’re just two people that are in love,” he continued. “It can be perceived as something else because of how much it is talked about and how much we are tracked whenever we do go out, but I would say that it’s as normal of…. It happened very organically even though from a media standpoint it was being tracked. It still happened very organically.”

Kelce added, “Nothing I’ve ever done has been a controlled, organized process. When I say it was so organic, we fell in love just based off the people we were sitting in a room together with. We are two fun-loving people who have the morals to appreciate everyone for who they are. We share all those values. It kind of just took the fuck off.”

Read Kelce’s full GQ cover story here.

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