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On the Gregory Mood Board: Eddie Murphy in Daddy Day Care, Will Smith in Hitch, and Delroy Lindo in Crooklyn. Murphy’s Charlie Hinton and Lindo’s Woody Carmichael spoke to the paternal instincts that Williams and Brunson wanted to shine through. “We wanted Gregory to feel like somebody who was not yet a great dad, but you knew he would be,” Williams says. “I think specifically as Black people, we need to continually romanticize Black dads.”
(Gregory’s own father, the military man Lt. Col. Martin Eddie, is played by Orlando Jones, who also appeared on Everybody Hates Chris. “When Quinta came to me and said, ‘We’ve gotta cast your dad, who do you want?,’ I was like, ‘It’s gotta be Orlando,’” Williams says. “He’s somebody whose career I’ve always respected, because he’s like, ‘I’ll do what I want, fuck it.’ He always finds a way to give me some words, so our relationship is kind of fatherly in that way.”)
“What I love most about him is watching him try to bridge the gap between being something he hasn’t seen before and what his kids need,” Williams says of Gregory. “I think a lot of Black men are trying to do something we’ve never seen before.” The more time the former substitute spends with his students, the better he understands his position as a role model, especially in light of the scarcity of Black male teachers in classrooms.
When I ask Williams how many Black male teachers he had growing up, he makes a zero with his hand. He’s surprised that I had any at all. Now, of course, he’s one of the adults in the room on the Abbott Elementary set. He wants to make things better for the show’s many child actors, especially since he understands the position they’re in. “Abbott, in general, has been therapeutic for me,” he says. “I needed to know that I could influence it being done differently.”
His influence extends to his adult co-stars as well. “He’s my Obi-Wan because I don’t know what I’m doing,” explains Janelle James, who plays Abbott’s shifty principal Ava. “So I listen to him, point for point—and whenever I don’t, he’s always right and I have to admit it. I feel super-lucky to be working with him, because he’s helped me navigate not only acting, but the business, what kind of car I should get. Everything.” Special-guest star Vince Staples, who had a recurring role as Gregory’s close friend, concurs. “I’m new to a lot of this stuff and he was able to translate it to certain things that I didn’t realize aligned with each other,” Staples says. “Explaining how to connect your character to your real life. Learning what to separate and what to keep. All those things come from experience.”
As much as it seems like Williams had a firm grasp on Gregory from the start, he admits that he didn’t truly find the character until the eighth episode of the first season. That’s when Gregory, struggling to get through to his students, loosens up and breaks out into dance during an anti-drug performance by Janine’s then-boyfriend, Tariq (Zack Fox, comedic gold). It helps win his students and co-workers over in an unexpected way. But Williams wasn’t confident that he could make the dance work, noting that he fought Brunson “tooth and nail” until he finally let go.
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Julian Kimble
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