Here’s some advice for aspiring actors: Carry a resume with you everywhere you go.
Four years ago, Mel Jackson was riding the No. 151 Sheridan Road bus, headed for his job at the McDonald’s restaurant in Water Tower Place, when he was approached by casting director Sharon King with an audition offer for a role in a movie.
“I didn’t have anything else to do that day,” he recalls. He nevertheless went to the audition, and wound up winning the part.
Now Jackson has a nice career going, with roles on the big and small screen. He plays Simuel St. James, the scheming ex-boyfriend of Nia Long in “Soul Food,” which was the third-highest grossing film last weekend.
On television he plays musician Tripp Williams, the new roommate for Queen Latifah and Kim Fields Freeman on Fox’s “Living Single” (Thursdays at 7 p.m. on WLFD-Ch. 32).
“I’m glad I’ve had the opportunities in such a short period of time, because I don’t think my story is the average story,” Jackson says. “The more I learn about the business, the more I learn how fortunate I really am to be on a bus and be discovered.”
Jackson, who celebrates his 27th birthday Oct. 13, had never seriously pursued acting. “I never knew how you could make money off it,” he says.
After he met Sharon King and got a role in “Scenes for the Soul” (an independent movie which was being made by writer-director George Tillman Jr. and producer Robert Teitel, who went on to make “Soul Food”), Jackson got involved in several local productions, including work at the E.T.A. Creative Arts Foundation on Chicago’s South Side. But Jackson, who had moved from McD’s to selling T-shirts and hats, hadn’t dedicated himself to a full-time acting career.
The turning point came two years ago, when Jackson found himself homeless for about six weeks.
Jackson had been staying at the home of a friend and his mother, when an argument between the two ensued. “She told him he had to go, and I had to go on G.P. (general principle),” laughs Jackson, who was born on Chicago’s West Side but now lives in Los Angeles.
When he wasn’t crashing at other friends’ dwellings, Jackson slept in his 1981 “doo-doo brown” compact car. He had some money saved, but was torn between using it to rent an apartment, or on pictures he could use when auditioning.
“I made the decision that I wasn’t going to let anything turn me back,” he says. “I said I’m going to focus and give this (acting) 150 percent and try to make it work.” Jackson used the money on the audition photos.
“It was the best investment I ever made,” Jackson says of the pictures, which helped him get his foot in the audition-process door.
Jackson got roles on TV series “NYPD Blue” and “Claude’s Crib,” and TV movies “Wallace” and the sequel to “To Sir, With Love” with Sidney Poitier.
It was a brief appearance on the HBO variety series “Midnight Mac,” which starred Chicago comic Bernie Mac, that caught the eye of Yvette Lee Bowser, the creator of “Living Single.” She kept in touch with Jackson, and put him in the pilot of a NBC sitcom “You Send Me,” which wasn’t picked up by the network.
But when Chicago’s T.C. Carson decided to exit “Living Single,” Bowser helped to get Jackson out of his UPN deal so he could take Carson’s spot on the long-running series.
Although Jackson tasted success in a relatively short period of time, he realizes how much show business “is like a roller coaster.” That may be a reason why he says he’s only taken a leave of absence from his last job, working as an usher, ticket-taker and concession stand operator for Sony’s Hyde Park multiplex theater.
“I always said if this ever happened, I would love to be working there when there’s a poster of a movie that I’m playing in,” Jackson says, “just to see how people would respond.”
