How Tyler James Williams brought his own child actor experience to his ‘Abbott Elementary’ directorial debut
[WARNING: The following story contains spoilers about the Feb. 5 episode of Abbott Elementary. Read at your own risk.]
While filming the penultimate episode of Season 3 of Abbott Elementary last year, Tyler James Williams casually mentioned something to Quinta Brunson.
More from GoldDerby
“I was talking to Quinta about just some stuff that I was thinking about doing in the future and I was like, ‘You know, I think I would love to try kind of my hand at directing because I feel really comfortable with this crew and the camera department and the directors and the producers,'” Williams tells Gold Derby. “And she got really excited and immediately walked me over to [director and executive producer] Randall Einhorn, and was like, ‘Tyler wants to direct next year!’ And I was like, ‘I didn’t say that. I just said I wanted to at some point.'”
“At some point” was, in fact, the following season. Williams made his directorial debut with Wednesday’s episode, “Science Fair.” As Season 4 got underway, Einhorn told the three-time Emmy nominee that there was a light story for his character Gregory coming up, which would allow him time to prep to direct. “I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity,” Williams said.
It’s fitting for the actor to take his first step behind the camera on a show featuring children. The 32-year-old got his start at age 4 before his big break on Everybody Hates Chris in 2005. Williams remembers being directed by Jerry Levine on the UPN/The CW sitcom, asking him questions about directing, and Levine, a former child actor himself, letting him see behind the camera.
“Jerry Levine was the first director who didn’t treat me like a child. He treated me like an artist. I remember him explaining things to me from an artist’s perspective rather than trying to manipulate me as a kid into a certain performance,” Williams says. “That’s where I can identify that my brain started to understand the way a show was shot from a director’s point of view. And then as I did a lot of TV and saw the way things were shot, I always had kind of ideas of like, ‘Well, maybe we could do this, or maybe we could come from this angle, or it’s just another way of storytelling.'”
It’s a combination of both his lengthy career experience and working on Abbott, where he and the camera department work “symbiotically,” that pushed Williams to finally take the plunge to direct. “There was just something about this show that was different. It feels very close to me, like family, and I’ve been kind of trying to get my hands dirty as much as I can elsewhere that this felt like the right opportunity to test that muscle and see if all the thoughts I had in my head worked if I was any good at them.”
In “Science Fair,” the school’s annual science fair brings out the competitive side of the teachers after Ava (Janelle James) decides to oversee a student’s project. Williams started prep during production on the previous week’s episode, “Girard Creek,” and spent a lot of time approving various experiments for the science fair, which took up the back half of the episode and features a lot of people and moving parts. In one of Gregory’s few scenes, Frank (Keith David), his barber and Ava’s estranged father who donated to the fair, calls out to Gregory, who’s standing right in front of Ava. Gregory gives one of his iconic deadpan camera stares.
“That was a crazy day,” Williams recalls. “What I had to essentially do was I was behind monitors for the first half of the scene. I then knew the cue for Gregory to enter. I would then leave monitors and step into the scene and then walk out of the scene and go back behind monitors, continue watching the scene that that followed. So it was a matter of getting in hair, makeup, and wardrobe at the top of the day, and then just being ready to step into a scene that I’m in at any given time. It’s splitting the brain to make sure that we have everything. But, again, I trust my camera department. If they say that they got it, they got it. We created a nice little pocket for Gregory in there. So as I stepped out of it, I looked over to a camera and they gave me a thumbs up and I was like, Cool, continue with scene.'”
Disney/Gilles Mingasson
Williams does not like watching himself and “had to kind of fall back on instinct” when it came to directing himself. Directing everyone else though? A blast. “So much of what made this episode easy where it could have been hard is the cast, I’m a fan of acting first. That’s why I think when I before I even became an actor, I was a fan of people who did good work, and this cast does really good work. Chris Perfetti does amazing work in this episode,” he says. “You can give him a note and he’ll give you five variations on that note, without even asking, and that’s just so beautiful about him as a performer. But it was really nice knowing what my castmates were capable of and seeing it in rehearsal for four years and then directing them from that perspective because there’s stuff that just doesn’t make episodes that we see and laugh at all the time, but now I can try to pull out in this one particular episode.”
The Golden Globe winner also appreciated the opportunity to direct David, who played his father in the 2019 film The Wedding Year. “I was already hype on that cause I was like, ‘Oh yeah, well, me and Keith, we have a shorthand already, we’ve done this and I know what he’s capable of doing.'” Frank and Ava’s reunion also provided the “emotional core” of the episode Williams was looking for. “It’s a very fast episode with a lot going on, and here’s what slows it down and gives us some grounding. It was really exciting to work with an actor that not only had I admired for so long, had worked with as an actor before, and now got a chance to direct, That was, I think, the cherry on top of the gift that was the episode itself. It was so well written, but I got a chance to work with Keith David and give him a moment in the midst of this half-hour comedy.”
SEE Abbott Elementary and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia are plotting a crossover
And when it came to directing the kids, Williams applied what he learned from his mentor Levine. “That was something I definitely carried into this episode, which was understanding that these are actors. They’re not kids to be manipulated into a certain joke or style.” He recalls sitting down with Lela Hoffmeister, who recurs as Courtney, and explaining what her character was going through in the episode. Courtney wins the science fair — and the Morty — for her experiment on “the effects of power dynamics in competitive environments.”
“And then I found her finding her own moments in the backgrounds of shots. I pointed it out to Quinta. I was like, ‘That’s what a child actor is,'” Williams continues. “A child actor is somebody who starts to pick up on things when you tell them and they make their own moments out of things. So it was really nice to do it in a healthy way and in a way that I hope gives all the kids in the episode a glimmer of light for what they can do in the future.”
Now that he has his first directorial effort in the can, Williams says he “learned that I can do it.” “I knew I was like well supported, but there’s always this aspect of like, ‘Maybe I don’t, maybe all my theories just don’t work,'” he continues. “There’s a shot where that kid runs out of Melissa’s (Lisa Ann Walter) classroom and into the hallway — that is a seamless cut. There’s a cut in there that we had to kind of build in to repo the cameras, and it was a really ambitious shot that I was like, ‘I think this is gonna work. I cannot prove to you that it will, but let’s try it.’ And it did. And I think that that confidence just helps when looking down the road at kind of doing other things.”
Abbott has already been renewed for a fifth season, so will Williams step back behind the camera again? “If they’ll have me, I’ll do it. I’ll definitely do it. I love this crew, I love this show, I love the people on it. Anything I can do to, I guess, help make it what it is, whether that be in front of the camera or behind it, I’ll always be down for.”
Best of GoldDerby
Sign up for Gold Derby's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
