On the edge of Manhattan’s Riverside Park, the actor Tyler James Williams paused to turn his digital camera toward an ascendant flock of pigeons. Pigeons are often considered an affliction of city living, but Williams enjoys them.
“I like the way they move as a group,” he said as he clicked. “I’m big on teams.”
That’s lucky, because for the last four years Williams has been part of one of the more successful teams on television. On “Abbott Elementary,” the ABC mockumentary set at an underfunded Philadelphia public school, he plays Gregory Eddie, a serious-minded teacher who falls for his buoyant colleague Janine, portrayed by the series creator Quinta Brunson.
Williams is a star of a show, which recently returned for its fifth season, but not the star. And still he stands out.
A former child actor, Williams, 33, endured some fallow young adult years to emerge as a skillful, wildly likable performer and more recently, a director. (The student is now arguably the teacher.) On “Abbott,” he is quietly redefining what a male romantic lead can be, making a case, laugh by laugh, for the cute, sensitive normie.
“I’m a very relatable heartthrob in Gregory,” he said.
This was on a breezy fall morning on the Upper West Side. Williams wore sunglasses, a concession to the squinty brightness of the day, and a Comme des Garçons Play windbreaker over black pants. (Fashion? Gregory would never.) A baseball cap would have made him unrecognizable. But that, he said, would be akin to hiding.
“Going outside to hide does something to me mentally,” he said. “I think I’ve done that for the majority of my life. New York allows me to not have to hide.”
New Yorkers, he said, mostly leave him alone. Even the pigeons. It’s one of the reasons he moved back here a few years ago from Los Angeles, where “Abbott Elementary” shoots.
“Everyone’s the main character of their own story,” he said as he surveyed the dog walkers and stroller pushers. “Here, you’re just another person.”
Williams’s show business story started early. He grew up in Yonkers, just north of New York City. His parents weren’t actors, and they didn’t know anyone who was. But when Williams was 4, he saw the Will Smith film “Men in Black” (1997), and something about that movie and that performance hooked him.
“I can’t even really fully explain it,” he said. “It’s one of the biggest moments of clarity I’ve ever had, and it’s at 4.” He knew, in that moment, that he had to be an actor.
That same year, he found his way to “Sesame Street,” an ideal entry point. He was surrounded by other children and by adults uniquely interested and expert in what children needed on set. He wishes that every child actor could start there.
Throughout his elementary school years, the work wasn’t overwhelming. He could still go to regular school and maintain regular friendships. That changed in 2005 when, at 12, he was cast as the star of “Everybody Hates Chris,” a family sitcom, originally airing on UPN, based on the early life of the comedian Chris Rock.
The actor Terry Crews, who played the father of Williams’s character on the show, recalled his obvious talent. Williams was line-perfect, Crews said, but he could also improvise, and he had a preternatural sense of where and how a joke should land.
“Honestly, I learned from Tyler even when he was a kid,” Crews wrote in an email. “You could see that he wanted to be there, he enjoyed it, and it came through in every performance.”
Williams did enjoy it, but he also felt the weight of responsibility. As the star, if he failed, the show would too. He knew how fortunate he was, and it wasn’t in his nature to act out or complain, so he didn’t. But he does remember feeling a bone-deep fatigue.
“It was the type of tired that I would go to sleep take a nap, and I wouldn’t recover,” he said. This time, he went to school on set and experienced adolescent milestones in unusual ways.
“Like for me, prom was the Emmys,” he said.
When “Everybody Hates Chris” ended, after four seasons, Williams struggled with teen fare. He was slender (“gangly” is the word he likes), a consequence partly of Crohn’s disease, and he found that casting directors were often looking for someone older and more filled out.
“There’s not a lot written for actual teens and what they look like in their bodies,” he said.
Gradually he became more selective. If he wanted longevity, he reasoned, he needed to vary his résumé, to argue for what he could do. Eventually the roles came, though often on shows that didn’t last long (“Whiskey Cavalier,” “Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders”). He had a multi-season arc on “The Walking Dead” and a role in the film “Dear White People.”
When he was 26, he guest-starred on “A Black Lady Sketch Show,” playing opposite Brunson in a “Romeo and Juliet”-inspired skit. They clicked immediately, bonded by a shared work ethic.
“When he showed up, it just was very clear and very apparent that this person is a serious person,” Brunson recalled.
A few months later, Brunson began to imagine “Abbott Elementary.” She had Williams in mind for Gregory from the beginning and invested the character with that same seriousness and sense of mission.
Because the role was largely written for Williams, the similarities are obvious: the no-nonsense attitude, the overthinking, the rigor, the sweetness. Both are particular around food — for example, Gregory insists “fruit should not be hot” — though in the actor’s case this owes to the dietary restrictions of Crohn’s disease. But Williams has more confidence than his alter ego, more comfort in himself. That comfort helped him to complicate Gregory.
“He took this character from someone who was a little bit more of a traditional leading man and turned him into this really interesting goofy guy,” said Justin Halpern, a writer on the series.
Williams still gets tired; he still gets stressed. But he takes comfort in knowing that the load is shared. His time in New York, in an apartment that overlooks the West Side Highway, where his mother used to drive him back and forth from “Sesame Street,” brings a kind of peace. He often spends his free hours just like this, walking around the neighborhood, camera in hand, seeing the world through the lens. The only picture on his Instagram that isn’t strictly promotional is a selfie he took, in which the camera blocks his face.
That makes a kind of sense. (But what a loss! What a face!) Williams isn’t shy, but he doesn’t seem to enjoy the more public-facing aspects of celebrity. He has been reluctant to discuss his personal life. And really, he said, there isn’t much to discuss as the show keeps him too busy to commit to a serious relationship.
So will it take cancellation for him to find love?
“That’s not worth it!” he said. “But I do think there’s a time for everything. Just give me a little bit.”
Still, the public curiosity is understandable, as “Abbott” has reinvented Williams as a hunk with a difference. In some ways, he is obvious as a romantic lead. “I could have chemistry with a rock,” he said. But his years in the business have revealed the limitations of trying, he said, “to always be the really cool guy or really sexy.”
Halpern said, “He’s showing you it’s OK to be curious and to be emotive, and it doesn’t make you less masculine.” Brunson added something similar.
“Young guys see themselves in him, flaws and all,” she said. “He’s not afraid to still be funny or less than perfect.”
Williams is happy to model a more expansive vision of Black masculinity. Being a role model, that’s a weight, too, but he doesn’t mind.
“It’s one of the best weights I’ve ever been able to carry,” he said. “Part of what I search for is freedom and liberation from those standards that feel unrealistic to some.”
As a director, Williams is also trying to model how a show that includes children can serve those children. (He directed the science fair episode last season and is gearing up for one that he describes as “equally if not more chaotic.”) Randall Einhorn, a veteran director on the series, noticed how Williams spoke to the young cast members.
“He wasn’t talking down to anybody,” Einhorn said. “He’s respectful of those young kids, and he tries to speak their language.” He knows to speak firmly and kindly, to encourage children to do their best without forcing them beyond their comfort or capabilities.
“You just want to rally them,” Williams said, “not intimidate or put pressure on them.”
Over a couple of hours in the park, Williams snapped pictures of a giant bug, a few trees, a lone pigeon that had separated from the flock and perched on the head of a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt. Behind the lens, he didn’t have to perform for anyone else or meet anyone’s expectations. One woman told him she loved the show and then sped on.
“I can walk around and not be stopped along the way,” he said approvingly. “It’s like thank you, let me continue. I’m in flow.”
Video produced by Jolie Ruben, Chevaz Clarke, Amanda Webster, Zach Caldwell, Cody Cutter and Thomas Vollkommer.
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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