When describing his character on Grey’s Anatomy, actor and activist Jesse Williams summed it up with, “He is very confident and likes to say what is on his mind.” Certainly his character, Jackson Avery, had no choice but to showcase his confidence; he joined the already-cohesive medical staff late in season six. Interestingly, some may say Williams is similar in his real life, off the set.
Williams On Baring it All
But it’s his on-stage persona that has social media talking lately.
Nude images and video of Jesse Williams starring in Broadway’s “Take Me Out” leaked on Monday night and began circulating online. The footage dropped on the same day Williams, 41, received a Tony nomination for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play.
All attendees of the play are required to place their phones and smart devices in a sealed Yondr case before the show “out of respect and support for our actors and in order to create a phone-free space,” according to 2nd Stage Theater’s website.
The NSFW site GayBlog.ca appeared to be the first to share the videos, and fans quickly reacted on Twitter, with some thanking the sneaky photographer for the leak and others suggesting a second career for Williams on the adult site OnlyFans.
Williams has since responded to the buzz around his scene.
“It’s a body, once you see it, you realize it’s whatever, it’s a boy!” Jesse said on the “Watch What Happens Live After Show.” “I just have to make it not that big of a deal.”
In the play, Williams plays a gay baseball player who comes out at the height of his success and encounters problems because of it. Earlier this month, the actor told Page 6 he was initially “terrified” of the role and the nude scene but eventually got over it.
“Then I noted that that was what I asked God for. I asked to be terrified,” Williams told the publication. “I asked to do something that was scary and challenging and made me earn it and made me feel alive and not comfortable.”
Williams as an Activist
Compared to Harry Belafonte for his outspokenness and candidness about civil rights issues, Jesse Williams is undoubtedly one of today’s notable civil rights activists. He is the youngest member of the board of directors at The Advancement Project, a civil rights advocacy group.
Jesse is also the executive producer of Question Bridge: Black Males, a multifaceted media project and website focused on the black male identity and the diversity within the demographic. He has written race-related articles for news stations such as CNN and has been a guest on newsroom talk shows like on Wolf Blitzer’s The Situation Room. But it seems like his voice reaches the most people through social media. For those who knew Jesse Williams before the half black and half white actor rose to fame, his active part in activism comes as no surprise.
Williams received two Bachelor’s Degrees from Temple University: one for African American Studies and one for Film & Media Arts. It’s apparent that both degrees helped shape Williams into the man he is today. After graduating, he taught high school African Studies, African American Studies, and English. In a 2013 interview with BET regarding his part in a movie about civil rights, Williams admitted, “I think one of the most fascinating things that I took in was, as somebody who studied the civil rights movement a significant amount in their upbringing, and taught it in high school, I was pretty familiar with the chunky material. But in my study of Reverend James Lawson, who I play, and spent time with….Oftentimes people trivialize that there was a self-defense movement, there was a Malcolm X perspective, there was a Black Panther perspective versus a non-violent Southern perspective. And it’s more complex than that of course, and I think it was interesting about Reverend Lawson’s perspective and his implementations of Ghandi’s practices from his experiences in India, which was the long term strategy of non-violence, of love force or what they called Satyagraha.”
After six years of teaching, Williams, who had been studying acting all the while, moved onto his acting career. His first television role was for an episode of Law and Order in 2006. He appeared in a few other shows before hitting the big screen with his first movie role in The Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants 2. Williams would go on to act in other films including the high-grossing The Butler. But currently, Williams is most famous for his role in the hugely popular, Grey’s Anatomy. And with this fame, Jesse Williams has a platform for activism.
It seems like for the past three years, the media has broadcast story after story of unarmed African Americans losing their life to “law enforcement” : so often that it has become a trend in the media (we all know it’s always been happening, but now it’s all over the television, newspapers, and blogs). Of course after hearing about such stories, Williams couldn’t sit idle. The Trayvon Martin case of 2012, in which an un-armed Martin, 17, was shot to death by George Zimmerman, didn’t actually involve a police officer, but it involved Zimmerman taking the “law” into his own hands (even when advised not to do so by the actual police). Jesse Willliams explained, “I hope the Trayvon case will not go in the way of a short term catalyst. I think that it needs to be contextualized. Trayvon is one of several. There’s Oscar Grant. There’s Jordan Davis. There’s a lot of young black men getting gunned down because people felt that they were threatened – unarmed boys who were supposedly threats because being a black man is “actually” some kind of aggression within itself.”
Live on CNN, Jesse Williams revealed his frustration with