Provo • The star quarterback donned a cowboy hat, western boots and jeans as he wielded a lightsaber in the middle of the Arizona desert.
Forty minutes east of civilization, in a mock ghost town, Kedon Slovis was filming a modern twist on the Shakespeare play “Hamlet”.
Yes, you read that right.
But stop the tape, rewind, how did he get there?
Slovis was a sophomore in high school back then. His International Baccalaureate English teacher gave everyone a choice: either write an essay about the tragic play or do a video recap of it in a different genre.
So Slovis naturally chose the latter and decided to blow it all the way up. He and a group of six of his friends spent weekends filming. The task originally called for two, five-minute videos. Slovis’ final product ended closer to an hour.
“I’ll be honest, we thought if we made the videos really long, then we’d waste time in class,” Slovis said. “But it ended up being pretty good.”
He drove his team out to a desert to film the first part. But the final act — a duel between Hamlet and Laertes — called for special effects and a secondary location.
Sloivs knew just the place past Pima, Ariz. — where he grew up — that resembled an old abandoned city fit for a Western (loosely the genre they were going for).
And for an entire Saturday, Slovis acted out Laertes’ killing of Hamlet with a Star Wars lightsaber. His friend Mateo Siegel, who would grow up to be a film major in college, was in charge of making it look real in post-production.
“I’m actually proud of it,” Slovis said. “The teacher showed it to all the other classes... I just figured, when am I ever going to do something like this again?”
For the better part of the last five years, everyone has gotten to know Slovis the football player. He was the showman on the field that either delighted you or made you scratch your head at USC, Pitt and now BYU.
But they don’t know the showman off the field. The real Slovis is eccentric, eclectic and reflective. And “Hamlet” is just the tip of the iceberg. Wait until you hear about his band, his love of the Beatles and more.
“I pride myself on not being a one-dimensional person,” Slovis said. “Not just be interested in football. I love football, and it is my life. But I never want to be the person that if I were to talk to Joe on the street, that it’s just about football. I want to be multifaceted.”
The Beatles
At one of Slovis’ first public outings as BYU’s quarterback, a fan came up to him and gave him a Beatles record. Later on, an anthology of Beatles songs was waiting at his locker before practice.
Apparently, word had gotten out about his love for the iconic band. And people started sensing that maybe Slovis wasn’t your typical quarterback.
“It’s a little uncommon,” his mother, Lisa Slovis, said, meaning it as a compliment. “He has always been interested in a lot of different things.”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Brigham Young Cougars quarterback Kedon Slovis (10) throws the ball away as BYU hosts Texas Tech, NCAA football in Provo on Saturday, Oct. 21, 2023.
Growing up the son of two grade-school teachers, and the youngest of two brothers, it was almost a requirement to have a breadth of interests.
Lisa Slovis is one of those parents who’d quiz her kids about which song was playing on the radio. When he didn’t know something, Kedon Sloivs would hop on YouTube and start researching history or elections. In place of television, he’d devour books.
“He is super inquisitive,” she said.
But nothing moved the needle quite like music. It was the heartbeat of the Slovis household.
His father, Max, was from England and introduced him to ‘90s grunge and alternative. His mom was more into the ‘60s and ‘70s, playing Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones and the Bee Gees. And his two older brothers, both at least 10 years his senior, blasted anything from heavy metal to the symphony and show tunes in their rooms all day.
They were both music guys, growing up to be in the marching band. One would go on to play at bars in Tempe and Phoenix.
“I always told [one of my brothers] I hated their music,” Slovis said, joking. “But now I like it. I ended up getting this pretty good mix of every decade, or every era, of music that hit pretty hard.”
The Beatles were something the entire family could get behind. Eventually, Lisa Slovis would just play John, Paul, Ringo and George in the car.
That was until grade school, when the family took a trip to Sedona. On the ride, Lisa Slovis brought her teaching assistant, Tara, with her. And the entire way up, with the Beatles playing, Tara seemingly unloaded every last detail about the British band.
Kedon switched the roles and started quizzing her on which Beatle was singing different parts.
“From that moment on I swear he was hooked,” she said.
The Beatles, and music in general, became his next passion. He took guitar lessons when he could in the summer and played the piano with his brothers. He dabbled in tuba in middle school.
All the while, he dove into the history and sound of his favorite band.
“He would play me a clip and be like, ‘This is John.’ Notice how it is nasally,” Lisa Slovis said. “He has this appreciation for sound. You know his kindergarten teacher said he had perfect pitch.”
Lisa didn’t think much of it. But it would come in handy later when he was unexpectedly the lead singer of a band.
The Leading Man
Everything was going wrong in the performance. The amp fell over several times. The mic cord was too short and kept getting caught.
But Kedon Slovis kept soldiering on, running around the stage trying to high-five the audience — anything to keep them engaged during his band’s rendition of The Who. Slovis was the lead singer and had invited all of his football teammates. Nearly 1,000 people were in the auditorium. He wasn’t about to let his band’s 15-minute act fail.
“It was a disaster,” Slovis would end up saying. “But it was pretty fun. My star receiver came up to me after and said, ‘I didn’t know you could sing.’”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Brigham Young Cougars quarterback Kedon Slovis (10) as BYU hosts Southern Utah University, NCAA football in Provo on Saturday, Sept. 9, 2023.
Not many did. After all, the whole band and Slovis’ role in it happened by chance.
Slovis was sitting in biology one day as a junior and overheard Siegel — the film guru who helped set up their “Hamlet” shoot — talking about Rock Revolution.
It was an annual event hosted at the high school for anybody in the community. Slovis’ brother had done it, performing the Red Hot Chili Peppers and preparing every night in the Slovis’ garage.
Siegel had a band ready, too.
“So I asked, ‘Who is going to sing?” Slovis remembered. “And he was like, that’s the issue, we don’t have a singer.”
Slovis hopped on it and responded, “I’m not Elvis or anything, but I can sing.”
They teamed up for a music project in high school. In history, they made a shot-for-shot re-creation of the Backstreet Boys Burger King commercial.
Slovis sang a bit and by Siegel’s estimation, “he was actually pretty good.”
So Siegel gave the green light for Slovis to be the lead singer of the band. The rest of the group still needed proof. So Slovis sent in an audition tape.
‘I remember sitting down before the performance and one person asked me, ‘Can he sing?’,” Max Slovis said. “I said, ‘Don’t know, I guess we will find out.’”
Slovis forgot a few lines as he trudged through songs by The Who and the Gorillas. His main skill was commanding the room in the first and only on-stage performance of Slovis’ life.
“We weren’t the Sex Pistols,” Siegel joked. “But it wasn’t like we had never picked up an instrument. We went with songs we knew we could do.”
Slovis added, “I was definitely thinking like, ‘Oh, no one’s gonna know about this. Like, whatever. I’m never gonna go on a stage and be super advanced like this again, why not do it now?”
Finding the little things
Before the season, Slovis and his father flew out to California and met up at BYU tight end Isaac Rex’s house in San Clemente.
They had a karaoke night and Slovis was singing in front of everyone. It brought back the memories of a past life.
These days, Slovis doesn’t have as much time for things outside of football. But he carves out little moments.
Before fall camp, his mom came to Provo and he sat on the back porch of the hotel room and listened to different Beatles albums.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Brigham Young Cougars quarterback Kedon Slovis (10) as BYU hosts Southern Utah University, NCAA football in Provo on Saturday, Sept. 9, 2023.
He talked about picking the guitar back up when it is all over and his college career ends in a few months.
Slovis understands that to most people, he will only be the showman on Saturdays. They won’t ever know him like he truly is.
But Slovis could think back to a favorite quote from “Hamlet”: “To thine own self be true.”
