Hi, I’m Wally.
And this is my story.
I’m a 20-year-old Sudanese Australian from Sunshine.
This is my house.
This is my family.
This my ride.
This is my plaza.
These are my friends.
This is my poster.
This is my court.
This is my ball.
This is my life.
All I do is hoop.
I love playing basketball.
I love watching basketball.
I love playing basketball on Playstation.
And now I play basketball on a brand new TV series called Sunshine.
It's Jacob Garang, from Australia.
Jacob is 99.9 percent me, overall. That one percent is he's just way too serious with life.
Say hello to my little friend!
Acting wasn't really my thing. I'm just an athlete, that's what I thought I was really, just a basketball player.
I gotta go.
Is everything okay, J?
Yeah.
Hey, brother! We're the Sunshine Kings!
Yeah, yeah, yeah boy!
We champions!
The first time reading the script was in the audition.
I was like damn this is going to be crazy. How am I going to do this in front of all these people?
And I turned up there, and some of the guys that auditioned didn't even know how to read.
It was the funniest thing.
And yeah that was it. I did good. 'Cause I could read.
I was like mum, I got the role. Can you believe that? She said, "Oh my God, come home my son".
You're going to be a celebrity. You're the first Sudanese celebrity.
Why didn't you wake me up?
Not too late.
I say, "Wally why, why you put other lady to be your mum, why you didn't put me?"
Yeah that's right.
You should play the dad!
Yes of course, I like it!
To be honest I thought I was going to be eating buffalo testicles or something.
It's goat testicle.
All my friends excited, all my community's really happy.
I never call anyone. Too many people have called me!
Well, for a young Sudanese teenager it's kind of tough growing up in Sunshine.
As you know, there's racial profiling and all that.
Some people just make mistakes you know?
And then when they get seen with those mistakes the whole community gets blamed
the whole race gets blamed for one person's mistake.
When we go to a supermarket or anything like that, we kind of get followed by security guards.
Because they think we might steal something. We just get profiled every time, and we kind of got used to it.
It's 2005.
This photo is taken the day before we came to Australia. We were all excited in the photo there.
All the family was here. Wally's here, his brother.
In Sudan, too much trouble, too much war. No anything, no school, no food, no anything.
We leave our parents, our family, we missing, some people dying.
I just said, I’m going to go with my kids. We just run from our country.
I remember when we first stepped in Australia was the airport and I saw KFC.
Man, to me back then I was a kid and you know, first time seeing chicken like that.
I thought what magical thing is this, you know?
When I started school, I had no English at all had zero English.
I was so behind. I didn't know how to say hi, hello. I couldn't even spell my name.
I remember, it took me about a month just to get my name right. Yeah and that was the toughest thing.
When I first held a basketball I was a young guy. I was a fat kid back in the day.
And then my coach he found me playing. He was like, 'Why don't you come try out for this?'
So after that day I just joined and I loved, I fell in love with the game.
I train almost every day. I have a lot of coaches that do a lot of things for me.
I'm going to try out for this NBL team soon and hopefully I get in.
There's some days you have where you just can't get up 'cause you're tired from the following day.
But my alarm has a comment on it when it goes off, it says, 'Trust the process, you've got to work hard'.
If it wasn't for my basketball, I wouldn't have got this acting thing. I believe I'm blessed through basketball.
Not a lot of basketball teams have theme songs, well my team has a theme song. It's called Long Horns.
And the song name is Red, White & Green.
Oh what's up man?
Yo, what up?
Are you coming to my house tonight for the private screening?
You’re going to be on TV.
I’ll be on my best behaviour, man.
Well tonight, we're having a private screening at my house. This is my family slash community.
I just want to show my people you know, everyone is being so excited. They're like, "Oh my God!"
That's the handshake from the show!
Thank you guys for coming to my watch my show tonight. You guys are like a family here.
First of all, thanks to mum and dad, firstly.
Thanks to my boys for coming out tonight. From basketball.
And the girls. Thank you so much.
This here is a lot of hard work in action. This is episode one of Sunshine, I hope you enjoy it.
Yeah, hard work pays off. That's my quote, that's my motivation every day.
One day you're going to be great, and you're going to be famous
and you're going to be known so do what you've got to do
and you know, you're going to make your mum happy and your dad happy, and that's the whole point of all this.
Cut!