Exclusive Interview: Pop Culturalist Chats with Fear Street’s Jeremy Ford

Jeremy Ford is poised to become the breakout star of 2021. This July, he’s starring as not one, but two characters in the highly-anticipated trilogy, Fear Street. Pop Culturalist was lucky enough to chat with this fast-rising talent about getting his start in the industry, his work behind the scenes, and, of course, we learned all about Fear Street.

Career

PC: How did you discover your passion for the arts?
Jeremy: I fell into it in an unusual way. I had never acted a day in my life until I was twenty years old. I wasn’t one of those kids who grew up doing community theater or anything like that. I was terribly shy. I hid behind my mom’s legs. That’s how shy I was. One day, when I was working at the mall (because what else do you do when you’re nineteen and not going to college?), one of my coworkers told me that she did background acting on the side. She told me to watch Pretty Little Liars because she was going to be on it. It blew my mind. I thought it was so cool that she was going to be on TV. I went and signed up with Central Casting in Burbank and I started doing background work. I fell in love with being on set. There is this wild electricity in the air on film sets. I was smitten. I hated background acting almost immediately, but I loved being on set. I decided then and there that I was going to pursue acting. I signed up for a local acting class and discovered how hard acting actually was, but I loved it. I still love it, which is nice to say after almost a decade of getting my ass handed to me by this industry.

PC: Who or what has had the biggest influence on your career?
Jeremy: That’s a hard list to narrow down to be honest. Certain things have happened in my life that kept me believing that I was destined to do this acting thing. Randomly, a talent manager came into my life right when I got serious about acting. That was huge because I got the opportunity to start auditioning right out of the gate, which I now know doesn’t happen to a lot of people. Believe it or not, that talent manager’s husband happened to be an Emmy-winning actor who took me under his wing and really molded me into the actor that I feel like I am today. A lot of people have really influenced my career and my decision to keep going for it, but those two feel godsent to me.

PC: In addition to acting, you’re also a writer, producer, and director. How has your work behind the scenes made you a strong actor and vice versa?
Jeremy: Mainly, I’ve learned not to take things so personally as an actor. It’s so easy to get in your head with insecurities and self-doubt if you don’t get a role you thought you were perfect for or even when you do get the part and you get a bit of direction that feels like an insult to your abilities.

It’s easy to fall into a “me vs. them” mentality as an actor. It’s me vs. the casting director or on a really bad day me vs. the director. That mentality sucks. It’s not good for anyone. But going through the process of writing and directing has shown me that no one is trying to take me down. If I don’t get that part that I thought I was perfect for, it doesn’t mean I suck. It means someone else simply was the part. I only understand that now as a writer. So much of this stuff is out of your control. That was pretty liberating to learn. As far as vice versa, being an actor for all these years has given me a cheat code for writing. I would encourage any actor to take a crack at writing.

PC: You’ve had a lot of success in your career. When you look back, is there a particular moment that stands out?
Jeremy: Booking Fear Street will be a moment that stands out for a while. It was about eight or so years of me waiting tables, bartending, and doing unpaid or low-paying acting jobs before Fear Street came my way.

The audition process for it was about six weeks of emotional hell for me, inching forward in the process, ducking behind the bar in the middle of a crazy shift trying to field emails and phone calls from my agent. There were a couple of exciting calls that came during those six weeks. That all happened while I was in the middle of a bartending shift. Hiding in the back under a table hearing my agent tell me that I had booked Fear Street will be burned in my brain forever.

Fear Street

PC: Tell us about Fear Street, your character, and what drew you to this project.
Jeremy: Fear Street is a Netflix trilogy based on the book series by R.L. Stine, the same guy who wrote the Goosebumps series. The Fear Street books were always a little more mature than Goosebumps, so the movies really took that and ran with it.

I play two characters, which is hard to explain. When you watch the films, you’ll get it. [laughs] I play Peter in Fear Street: 1994. He’s a real…scumbag. That’s fair to say. He’s the hotshot football star from the rival school who gets sucked into the curse that’s been plaguing the town of Shadyside. In Fear Street: 1666, I play his seventeenth-century counterpart named Caleb, who’s also a real piece of sh*t. He’s arguably worse than Peter.

I’d be foolish to not admit that the scope of the project is what initially drew me in. A studio trilogy sounded dreamy and basically impossible. But when I started getting called back for more auditions, I realized how good these movies were going to be. The scripts were unreal. It bummed me out because by then I was emotionally invested in the material. If I couldn’t be a part of them, I’d be devastated. I owe a lot to Leigh Janiak for seeing something in me.

PC: Did you feel any pressure heading into this project, given how popular this book series is?
Jeremy: I felt a tremendous amount of pressure for a million other reasons actually. Anything that excites me also scares me. I’m super hard on myself as an actor. If I show up on set and feel like I didn’t use every second of my time to prepare, I kick myself. When I found out how important this book series was to so many people the pressure cooker really kicked up a notch. But it was a good pressure. It’s the kind of pressure I want.

PC: When you’re working on a project that’s based on a popular book series, how much do you use the source material as a frame of reference? Does that change the preparation?
Jeremy: I didn’t grow up reading Fear Street or Goosebumps. I was a real chicken when I was a kid. I hated being scared. When I came onto the Fear Street movies, I of course bought some Fear Street books, but I didn’t read them. I decided anything I needed to know about my characters would come from the scripts and from [director] Leigh Janiak. I didn’t want to be the guy on set that said, “But in the books, it’s actually like this…” I wouldn’t like that guy, so I didn’t want to be him.

PC: This is one of your biggest roles to date. Did anything surprise you about the experience? What was the biggest takeaway?
Jeremy: A week before I flew out to Atlanta to start shooting 1994, I was working on this low-budget film as one of the leads. If I’m completely honest, I felt like hot sh*t at the time. I had done so many low-budget movies that I had nothing but confidence on set. When I showed up for day one of Fear Street, I brought that same confidence until I saw how big this production was. I went from a set that had maybe twenty people around to Fear Street, which had almost two hundred. It shook me. I was dreadfully nervous that first day. I was so nervous that my heart was beating so loud that the sound guy couldn’t hear my lines over it. What a great first impression for the director and producers. But it was good because I needed that hyper-confidence to be rocked a bit. I can say that in hindsight, but I didn’t feel that way in the moment.

Pop Culturalist Speed Round

PC: Favorite book?
Jeremy: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.

PC: Favorite play or musical?
Jeremy: That’s a hard one. I feel like every play I read blows me away. Probably because the format is still so new to me. Two big standouts are Danny and the Deep Blue Sea by John Patrick Shanley and Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin.

PC: A band or artist that fans would be surprised to learn is on your playlist?
Jeremy: I don’t know if this qualifies as a surprise or not, but Ariana Grande really fires me up.

PC: Dream role?
Jeremy: I don’t know if I have a dream role. Definitely dream co-workers if that’s fair to say. I’d love to work with Derek Cianfrance, Greta Gerwig, Denis Villeneuve, Jonathan Majors, Ben Foster. That list could truly go on forever.

To keep up with Jeremy, follow him on Instagram. Watch Fear Street on Netflix on July 2nd.

Photo Credit: Ryan Orange