Brandon Scott Jones is a man of many talents. He’s an actor, writer and producer. He’s worked on shows like Ghosts and The Other Two, as well as movies like Rebel Wilson’s Isn’t It Romantic. His latest project with Wilson is Senior Year, which he not only appears in but also co-wrote. A funny and introspective look at high school through the eyes of someone who’s spent the last 20 years in a coma, Senior Year isn’t just a teen comedy, it’s also a movie that acknowledges just how hard being a teenager was for so many of us who have long since left that phase of our lives behind.
Jones certainly counts himself among that crew, growing up as a “closeted queer kid” and high school drama svengali. With Senior Year now streaming on Netflix, Tudum talked to Jones about his own journey from a brash kid who thought making a cabaret tribute to his school’s janitors would be a good idea to the smart, savvy and proudly out adult he is today.
Who were you in high school, and how did that play into your vision for Senior Year? The easiest way to describe me is I wasn’t popular amongst the students, but I was very popular amongst the staff. The faculty really liked me. The lunch ladies would give me free lunches if they saw me in the plays, and the principal would invite me into their office to give me cake on their birthday.
I think part of it is being a closeted queer kid. There’s a stimulation of talking to adults desperately searching for some sort of comfort in the future, if that makes sense. And so you sort of relate to adults a little bit.
That being said, the other half of me was this kid that was absolutely obsessed with all things pop culture back then, like my room was this shrine to Britney Spears and Sarah Michelle Gellar and the pop stars of that era.
When it comes to the other half of that question about how I put myself into those characters, I think it was this desire or this idea that the world seemed so big and bright, but it was before the internet and social media ever took hold. So, the way I consumed everything, I put so much value in what teen movies and MTV and magazines were telling me. I thought it was a really interesting starting point for these characters to be products of that era that didn’t necessarily have the access that the Gen Z kids have now.
It is wild to think about how, for instance, if you were a young queer kid, you might have only a few TV shows to watch where you could see someone living the life you might want. It’s why I like the reference to The Real World: New Orleans in the movie. Now, we’re on Season 15 of Drag Race and there’s 10 different queer dating shows. There’s access. One hundred percent. Danny from The Real World was truly an icon for me. He was the first real access point that I had to that world that I knew I was a part of but didn’t have the language to really explore.
D’arcy Carden made a joke that you retweeted about Stephanie’s room in the movie being a replica of your room, and you mentioned it a little, but the room in the movie seemed very accurate. How much input did you have into that? I think on my Instagram, somewhere deep in the posts, I have a picture of just one wall of my bedroom growing up. It was the remnants of what had been there after I had moved away to New York City. I texted a picture of it to Alex [Hardcastle], Senior Year’s director, and was like, "Hey, just to let you know, this is the space that I’m imagining she inhabits."
When I walked into that set, it was really strange and surreal for me, because it didn’t look like my room but it felt like my room, with the CD rack, the collage art, the Polaroids... it was just truly ultimate teenybopper as far as you can go without having a Twitter and Instagram.
Were you in any clubs in high school? Did you have a superlative? I did get superlatives. I got "most dramatic" and "most likely to be a star." I will say that those are probably correlated to the way I was as the president of my drama club in high school. I remember freshman year starting the plays and getting involved in the theater department, I just decided that this is going to be my place and I clawed myself tooth and nail to the top.
I always joke, and this is not like a funny joke, but I always joke that, by the time I got to be president of my drama club, I was like a teenage Scott Rudin. I was so obsessed with really trying to put on like the highest quality shows. I remember having a meeting and talking about how we really needed to have Broadway caliber shows here at the high school. I was calling The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun trying to get them to come review our shows. I remember trying to sell season tickets, I was in charge of putting together the fundraising cabaret, and I basically spearheaded this show that I was going to call Janitorium, which was a celebration of our janitors. Oh, my god, I’m literally about to throw up talking to you about this. It’s so, so humiliating. Thankfully, that show never saw the light of day because we turned in a script to our faculty advisors, and they were like, "Absolutely not, we will not."
I will say that it was something where, you know, I was an overweight, queer kid, and so, I was probably sad in a lot of ways. I felt a good sense of gravity in that space, probably a little too much. But that’s also a good example of who I am as well. If I’m really into something, I’ll like it so much that it absolutely becomes devoid of joy.
I understand that. I took high school newspaper very seriously, where I was basically working on it full time. I felt like it was my literal adult job. I think “adult job” is a good way to look at it. I really was very into the idea that I was the artistic director of this theater company, which was the Bel Air High School drama club.
How would you describe your Senior Year character, Mr. T? Why do you think he chose to become an educator? I think Mr. T, in my brain, is this product of somebody who never really left his high school years. If you saw more scenes with him, I think you would see him really trying to have a rapport with the students, and I think it’s coming from this idea of wanting to be a safe space, but he’s trying way too hard so he looks like a try-hard poseur.
Putting that in the guidance counselor is always very funny because they’re literally called guidance counselors, and these kids either rely on you or they absolutely don’t. I think he feels that pressure and would immediately crumble under the weight of it the second anybody asks him any real advice.
He’s got “cool mom” energy. That’s it. “I’m not a regular mom. I’m a cool mom.” “I’m not a regular guidance counselor, I’m a cool guidance counselor,” but he couldn’t be less cool.
There are a lot of jokes in the movie about how high school has changed. Did you research that, or were you just building a dream high school? I think that, more than it being a dream high school, it’s Martha’s dream high school, which is all inclusive and celebrates a lot of values. That was one starting place.
The other starting place was that my dad’s a high school teacher, so I asked him for his observations of how the kids have changed, but, also at the same time, we talked about the idea that even if you create that environment, it’s still going to high school. Teenagers are still locked in a building together. There are going to be these growing pains that affect all of your student body, regardless of whether or not we’re saying it out loud.
I do think that the way younger people have changed is the access to communication that they have. Only the coolest kids had cell phones in high school [when I went], but now everybody’s got one. There’s a line in the movie where she’s like, "You don’t realize how many people don’t care about you until you see it as a number on your phone," and that would have crushed me as a kid. And so, when it comes to that stuff, that was hopefully one of the things that we tried to have come through, that you can create this environment, but teenagers are still going to be teenagers.
Then again, this movie is about adults as well and those two worlds colliding, and so, what I really tried to look at was what’s changed in pop culture and the way we consume. Teen comedies and teen stories in the early 2000s, we really had She’s All That, we had 10 Things I Hate About You, we had, to some extent, Never Been Kissed and Get Over It and Down To You, Drive Me Crazy, all of these movies, but they were all these similar, very light stories. Now I look at what we have, and we have everything ranging from Euphoria to The Fault in Our Stars, which deals with life and death. We also have wonderful movies like To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and more queer stories like Love, Simon and Love, Victor that you would never necessarily see, at least when I was younger. I was just trying to say, "What is the difference between those two eras of movies, and how could they be meshed together?"
You mentioned some classic teen movies, but I’m wondering if you have favorites — or maybe ones that you think we should talk about more? Are you a big fan of Camp, for instance? I remember Camp. I auditioned for Camp when I was 17. Isn’t that funny? Maybe I was 16 or something. I was like, "Oh, my god, what a cool idea for a teen movie." I couldn’t believe those characters.
It’s all about access. Back then, we didn’t have as many options or avenues for finding content and stories as we do now. It was a little less autonomous. It was “take the meal you’re served” versus now, where we can shop around a little bit.
I do have some favorites from back then. I would say that the gold standard in terms of, like, a teen comedy for me will forever be Clueless. Also American Pie, which I thought was just this funny teen sex romp. God, “sex romp.” I sound like I’m 1000. I just remember at the time being like, “Oh, my god, this is so daring and edgy.” Mean Girls is another great one that’s really well done, really thoughtful, really smart and funny in a lot of ways.
I have some favorites that have come out recently, like I loved Alex Strangelove on Netflix. I thought that movie was just fantastic in so many ways. I really liked Booksmart. It’s such a great genre that will always always be with us. I’m glad that we’re seeing a lot more types of stories that come with them.
