Every year the NFL draft ends with a joke. The final pick of the final round gets handed a nickname, Mr. Irrelevant, and the nickname is the point: nobody expects him to last. In 1983 the last name called was John Tuggle, a fullback out of California, and he did something nobody picked last had ever done: he made the team that drafted him. He is the first player in league history to manage it. Paramount put the trailer for his film online on 13 September, and it opens with him introducing himself like it is the most ordinary thing in the world. “Yeah, I’m John Tuggle and I play football.”
“Mr. Irrelevant: The John Tuggle Story” arrives in cinemas on Christmas Day, 25 December, from Paramount and Skydance Sports. Jonathan Levine directs from a script by Nick Santora. John Tuggle (David Corenswet) is the lead, with Katie (Isabel May), Bill Parcells (Michael Shannon) and Julius “Whitey” Horai (David Krumholtz). Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the trailer and for what happened to the real John Tuggle, which the film does not hide and neither will we.
He did something nobody picked last had ever done: he made the team that drafted him.”
The trailer gets the draft out of the way in one line of commentary. “The final pick of the final round, the New York Giants select John Tuggle. This year’s Mr. Irrelevant.” Then it goes straight to the joke everybody made about him, which is that he was too small. He turns up at the team hotel and his new roommate looks him up and down. “Hey, little man, you sure you’re in the right place?” Tuggle: “I’m John. I’m your roommate.” The roommate, delighted: “I thought you were the high school intern or something.” Tuggle’s answer is the first sign of what the film thinks he was: “We weren’t all born six foot five and three hundred pounds. I didn’t come out that way. That would have killed my momma.”
The best scene in the cut has nothing to do with football. Tuggle turns up somewhere out of breath and Katie asks if he is alright. “I ran about ten miles to get here.” She does not believe him. “You really ran here?” He did, and he explains why: “I had to have time to come up with an opening line. Something like, I’d regret it the rest of my life if I didn’t do everything I could to know who you are.” She tells him it is horrible. He agrees, sort of. “It’s pretty good though.” Corenswet plays it with the same unguarded decency he brought to Superman, and it works for exactly the same reason.
Then it is the Giants, and the Giants of 1983 are a specific and frightening place to arrive. Tuggle spots the head coach across a room and announces he is going to say hello. “That’s Parcells over there. I’m gonna go say hi quick.” What follows is him interrupting a press conference to introduce himself: “Sorry to interrupt, everybody. I’m… I’m Mr. Irrelevant.” A reporter asks whether he has a shot. Somebody, presumably a coach, detonates: “you don’t talk to him, he doesn’t get to talk, get your ass on the field.” A voice defends him, weakly, as a nice guy. Elsewhere a teammate sets Lawrence Taylor on him and tells LT to knock him back to California. Parcells, later, gives him the line the marketing loves: “tougher than train smoke.”
The turn is handled quickly and without music, which is the right call. A coach tells the room that one in three of them will not be a New York Giant. Somebody reassures Tuggle that he is not getting cut, and his answer lands differently the second time you hear it: “I’m not worried about me.” Then a doctor, flat and careful: “so, we’ve found something, and it needs treatment quickly.” Somebody says it is going to be fine. And Tuggle, in the line the whole film is presumably built around, says: “if I’m not the guy who keeps on fighting, then I don’t know who I am.”
Here is what actually happened, because the film is not inventing a disease for drama. Tuggle spent most of 1983 on special teams, then took over at starting fullback in week twelve when Rob Carpenter got hurt. He finished the year with seventeen carries for forty-nine yards and a touchdown, three catches for fifty, and nine kickoff returns, and the Giants named him their special teams player of the year. He wrecked his knee at a minicamp the following offseason and went on injured reserve. Later in 1984 he was diagnosed with angiosarcoma, a rare and aggressive cancer. He took chemotherapy and radiation and watched Giants games from the film booth at the stadium. He died on 30 August 1986. He was twenty-five.
Knowing that changes how the back half of the trailer plays. A crowd chants his name. A teammate shouts, “if he can keep running, we can keep running.” Katie tells him this is exactly where she wants to be after he says she has put her life on hold for him. And Parcells, at the end, gives him a sentence that is either the most generous thing a coach can say or the saddest: “I have never learned as much from a player as I learned from you.” Shannon is a genuinely interesting piece of casting there, because Parcells in 1983 was a first-year head coach who nearly got fired, not yet the two-time Super Bowl winner, and Shannon is not an actor who plays warmth cheaply.
One production detail is worth knowing because you will not guess it from a frame of this. None of it was shot in New Jersey. Principal photography ran in Victoria, Australia from April 2025, with Melbourne and Geelong doubling for New York, and Kardinia Park Stadium in Geelong and La Trobe University Sports Park standing in for NFL stadiums. The shoot reportedly created 825 jobs and put around 29 million dollars into the local economy. An American football film about a New York institution, made in its entirety on the other side of the world, and on the evidence of the trailer you cannot tell.
The obvious worry is the date. Paramount is opening this on Christmas Day, against the biggest weekend of the year, with a film whose ending is a twenty-five-year-old dying of cancer. That is either confidence or a category error, and the trailer does not entirely resolve which. What it does do is refuse to be coy: the diagnosis is in the trailer, the fight is in the trailer, and nobody is being sold a film where the underdog wins the big game at the end. A sports movie that tells you up front it is not that is at least being honest with you, and Corenswet looks like he can carry the rest.
What Do You Think? Is Christmas Day the right slot for a film that ends the way this one has to, or has Paramount talked itself into a prestige date it cannot support? Does David Corenswet have the range to carry a real man’s death after a year of being Superman? And is “the last pick who actually made it” a big enough hook for people who do not follow the NFL?
See you on the next binge!
