Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen: Darkslides and Secret Tapes

See acclaimed skaters Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen discuss skating, their careers, highs and lows and more at ACL Live at the Moody Theater on April 7!

“About Tony Hawk

Tony Hawk was just nine-years old when his brother gave him his first skateboard. By fourteen he’d turned pro, and by sixteen he was widely considered the best skateboarder on earth. In 1999, he became the first skater to ever complete a 900, and shortly thereafter, launched Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, his now billion-dollar video game franchise. The Hawk empire includes Birdhouse Skateboards, Hawk Clothing, and the Tony Hawk Signature Series products, as well as his production company, 900 Films. In 2022, a biographical documentary film titled Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off by award-winning director Sam Jones debuted on HBO, giving an in-depth look at Tony’s legendary career and personal life. Tony founded The Skatepark Project, which helps underserved communities create safe and inclusive skateparks for youth.

About Rodney Mullen

If you Google Godfather of street skating, Rodney pops up because he invented most of the tricks defining its modern era. He’s also the most dominant world champion in the history of the sport, defending his title 35 of 36 times. After building the era’s largest skate company, he turned to open-source computing, finding parallels between skate and hacker cultures that foster innovation; his very first talk on this went to TED; since then, he has extended these ideas for the Smithsonian, Apple, IBM, Wired BizCon, MIT, JPL, BrainMind, and Anna Wintour. Rodney’s been in the public eye since his teenage years, including multiple doc’s, movies, and over a dozen video games—he’s even been nominated for a BAFTA. More recently, in print: Rolling Stone, Esquire, the New Yorker, Vogue, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Wired have all written articles on other facets of his life. He’s featured heavily in multiple books, including an autobiography by Regan Books. The National Academy of Sciences even featured him in their study, Educating to Innovate, plus he’s also collaborated on multiple scientific papers. Rodney was appointed as a Director’s Fellow at MIT Media Lab in 2019, then a Distinguished Research Scholar at the Smithsonian in 2020, and recently a Collaborator in the Department of Complex Pain & Addictions Services at Vancouver General Hospital. Presently he’s been invited to address the British Royal Society in London and acts as a Scientific Advisor to the C4 Foundation for active-duty Navy SEALs. He co-founded an Augmented Reality company in 2018 that’s been nominated for multiple awards and works closely with Niantic as well as Apple.”