If you’ve had a chance to leaf through the pages of College of Charleston Magazine’s summer issue and read the cover story, then you already know that it’s not your typical celebrity profile. It’s something far different: an origin story and an experimental writing exercise that puts you, the reader, in Orlando Jones’ shoes.
Mark Berry, the magazine’s editor and the writer of “You Are Me: The Education of the Precocious, Creatively Ferocious Orlando Jones,” explains more about this inventive piece and its amazing subject.
Q: Why do this story now?
A: This piece has been about five years in the making. We were doing an entertainment issue in the summer of 2009 and, unfortunately, we couldn’t make it work with Orlando’s schedule. As you might guess, he was a little busy – doing several network sit-coms and other development deals tying up his time on the West Coast. Well, time marched on, and last fall, we reached out to him through Larry Spann ’94 (of Holywood Productions), who connected us with his publicist, Sabrina Hutchinson. We worked with Sabrina for several months to carve out an afternoon with Orlando in May, right before he began shooting the second season of Fox’s Sleepy Hollow, which is shot in Wilmington, N.C.
Q: This piece is a little different, to say the least. Why did you take this approach in telling Jones’ story?
A: Basically, I didn’t want this article to be predictable. Celebrity profiles tend to only scratch the surface of a person’s life. And it seems that the approach of those stories is always the same. And while no magazine profile can be exhaustive, I wanted our piece to capture a side of Orlando that many people may not see: the intellectual Orlando, the man who is an exceptional and rare creative force in the industry. I wanted the story to show his academic bent and unshakeable confidence – something that has been with him since his teen years. I thought it would be interesting for our readers to experience his life as if they are living it – like a director telling actors the background of the characters they are playing. I hoped using “you” as the subject throughout makes the story more vivid within the reader’s mind and pushes the pace of the reading experience. It’s a long piece, but a quick read.
Q: Were there any details/tidbits that were left on the cutting-room floor?
Orlando Jones from The Meteor (CofC student newspaper)
A: There were many moments from my conversation with Orlando that I wanted to weave into the piece, but just didn’t have the real estate. We talked about him coming up with the “Make 7-Up Yours” ad campaign, his memorable cameo in Office Space (which he based off his niece’s door-to-door cookie sales technique), his fan-favorite role as a college band director in Drum Line and his most recent transformation from a comedic actor to a dramatic actor on Sleepy Hollow. I also wish I could have included more recollections from his college friends, such as his roommate Marcus Cade ’88, a fighter pilot.
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But it was his grandmother’s story that deserves special mention. Unfortunately, it didn’t have a place in the final piece. Orlando, who was very close with her, told me that before she died of breast cancer at 60 years old, she instructed him to find something positive in her death. For Orlando, who was 16-17 years old then, that seemed like a pretty tall order. Later that year, he prepared a bourbon orange turkey (oranges soaked in bourbon for two days and then cooked inside the turkey) with his close friend Colin Quashie in Charleston. They finished the bird off, and that’s when Orlando started examining the turkey’s carcass, which reminded him of his grandmother’s wizened body in her final days.
He turned to Quashie and said, “Man, I think I’m done with meat. Nah, really, I’m done with it.” Orlando became a vegan at 17 (much to his parents’ dismay) and has stuck with it ever since. It shows again how Orlando was ahead of the curve at a very early age and made these major life decisions on his own terms.
