Exclusive Interview: Pop Culturalist Chats with Stargirl’s Neil Jackson

As a young boy living in Luton, England, Neil Jackson became enamored by the world unfolding in front of him on the screen. Each week, he begged his father to take him to the movies so he could enjoy a small taste of cinematic magic. What he didn’t know then was that he would one day see himself up there, inspiring the next generation of storytellers.

It’s a milestone that’s not lost on Neil, who faced several obstacles on his journey to becoming the artist he is today. Pop Culturalist caught up with Neil for an inspiring conversation about taking the road less traveled and how it led him to playing a DC super-villain in the new CW series Stargirl.

Career

PC: You were studying sports science before making the pivot back into acting. Tell us about that journey and what you learned about yourself during that time.
Neil: It was interesting. I studied acting when I was in high school. I didn’t know anybody that was in the entertainment industry, so it’s something that I did for fun. When it was time to speak with a career counselor when I was seventeen, I told her that I wanted to be an actor. She laughed at me. Then we chatted about what would be a realistic option for me as a career choice. I was always very sporty and involved in sports, so we decided that it’d be best for me to join the military. I went to a potential access course for the Royal Marines and I failed. They really wanted applicants who were twenty-one and had a degree.

They told me they would keep my name on file and to come back when I was twenty-one. I went to university to get an undergraduate degree so I could reapply for the Marines. Then it would be a life on the ocean waves. The first university that accepted my application for sports science was Cardiff in Wales. I went there and six weeks into being at university, I was like, “Why the fu*k do I want to be a Marine for?” The idea of that regimen of being dragged out of bed at 4:00 a.m. to do push-ups in the mud didn’t sound particularly appealing anymore.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I kept pursuing my degree. While pursuing my degree, I was also an amateur boxer. I won a couple of medals and titles for the university. It was the first time in the school’s history that they had a boxer win. The dean of the college contacted me and asked me if I’d be interested in staying on to do a master’s degree in sports science. I wasn’t sure it was something that I wanted to do, but they were willing to give me a scholarship to do the master’s. Since I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, I decided to stay for another two years.

I was hoping that I would figure out what I wanted to do. Six or seven months into my master’s program, I knew I wasn’t happy. I was working as a bouncer at a club. I did that three or four nights a week, and I trained about five days a week. I was competing as a boxer every six to eight weeks. My life was moving rapidly away from anything that was creative. I was getting really angry, and it was affecting me. My ex-girlfriend at the time asked me, “If you’re not happy right now, when was the last time that you were happy?” The first thought that came into my head was when I was in school doing plays and rehearsing.

So I tried to enroll in the worst college of music and drama. They had an open audition. You had to come prepared with a monologue and a song. A minute into my monologue, they were like, “We’re going to stop you there. You clearly have no training. We don’t think that you’re ever going to have a career in acting. Thanks for coming.”

The fighter in me was like, “I’ll prove you wrong!” So I spoke with the dean of my college, and he allowed me to complete my master’s degree in one year. At the same time, I enrolled in a part-time acting course in London. I finished up my master’s degree and moved to London to finish that part-time acting course, which was two years. It was allied with RADA, run by this teacher named Michael Armstrong, who still to this day is a dear friend of mine. I graduated there nearly nineteen years ago. University taught me a lot, but it also taught me that the path I was on wasn’t the one that I wanted to be on.

PC: Who or what has had the biggest influence on your career?
Neil: That’s a really good question. There are so many answers to that. I did a TV show years ago and it was my second or third year as a professional actor. It was a TV show that was almost like a soap opera. There were thirty-two episodes a season. It was called Dream Team. I very quickly fell into a place of comfort when I was on set. It was a job that I could do standing on my head. It didn’t really challenge me as an actor, but the character I was playing was really fun. I was messing around and enjoying the process, which was great, but I wasn’t looking in any way to bring anything more to the script or the character. Then an actor came on set, he had done all this work, and he really outlined and decided what he wanted to do with his character and worked really hard to bring something extra to the table. It was a real reminder to me that this is a craft. As much as you can play and enjoy it, you still need to put the work in. That actor was a huge influence on me because it reminded me that I have to go back to the basics and build this character from the ground up. He was so instrumental.

Michael Armstrong was another. He taught me how to act. He was a teacher at RADA in Britain. He’s the first person that I call with anything creative. He’s a very, very strong mentor for me in all things creative. As a writer, director, and actor, he always has an abundance of wisdom to help improve my art.

PC: Speaking of wisdom, you’ve been in this industry for a couple of years now. When you look back, what’s one thing you know now that you wish you knew when you started?
Neil: The biggest thing is not to put so much pressure on myself. When I started out, I used to look at revered actors like the Pacinos, the De Niros. Jimmy Stewart was always an actor that I loved and admired. If you look at their IMDb credits, they never took a wrong step. There’s not one project where you’re like, “That’s a dud.” Every one was a stepping-stone building to this perfect career. I put a lot of pressure on myself to have that type of career.

Your career is going to be everything and anything. Yes, there are people that seemingly on the page have perfect careers, but that’s not me and that’s not my career. There’s nothing on my résumé that I’m embarrassed about. I’m very, very proud of the stuff that I’ve done. I wish I knew back then not to put that much pressure on myself and to enjoy it more. Enjoy the process. The bottom line is I’m a boy from Luton, which is a town twenty miles north of London. It’s a rough, working-class town. It’s like Detroit, if you’re drawing comparisons to the States. No one I met while I was living there was in this industry. So the fact that this boy from Luton gets to be on a set with Daniel Craig on a James Bond movie or stand in World War I clothing on the set of the Kingsmen prequel and gets to be a DC super-villain in a massive TV show, that isn’t lost on me.

It feels like I’ve come full circle. I’m able to play and enjoy it, and my craft is good. At forty-four, I’m living the dream.

Stargirl

PC: Speaking of playing a DC super villain, tell us about Stargirl and your character.
Neil: Stargirl is this huge new DC Universe. It’s kind of part of the Arrow-verse, which has been created on the CW. But it expands on it in a completely new way. Geoff Jones created it. He’s a comic book god and creative artist. We’ve been friends for fifteen years, ever since we worked on Blade [the series] together. He created this really fun world. It’s a fun family adventure that everyone can enjoy together. I’ve never worked on a TV series that has had this much money. [laughs] It’s a luxury, and that shows up on screen.

The world that Geoff has created is spectacular. There’s something in there for everyone. It’s an incredibly fun high school drama, but there’s also a world that my character lives in that’s very dark and emotional. When the two clash, you get this incredible fusion, which is so fun to watch. You’ve got incredible superheroes and villains! We’ve got Brainwave, who can move everything with his mind. He’s the most sinister character in it, in my opinion. Then you have Dragon King, who is this hundred-year-old man who’s been experimenting on his body for years. And then you have my character, Icicle, who can freeze everything around him, which makes him incredibly powerful.

PC: When you’re playing a character that’s based on a popular comic book series, do you go back to the source material and draw inspiration or do you like to build that from scratch?
Neil: There have been a few iterations of Icicle that have appeared on screen, but to be polite, they’ve all been slightly silly. What Geoff has done is he’s taken the bones of who Icicle is and he’s invented a whole new mythology behind him. For the first time, there’s a backstory about who he is and what led him to get his powers and how that led him down the road to the Injustice Society.

Because of that, I didn’t take any research off the internet because that’s not the character that I’m playing. When Geoff explained to me Jordan/Icicle’s story, he told me he fell in love, got married, had a kid, and everything was great in his life. Later in life, his wife got cancer, and it was aggressive. She died very quickly. She contracted that cancer because of toxic waste that was on the land that a school was built on that she worked in. So that made Jordan’s personal mission in life to make sure this never happens to anyone again.

He sets up the Injustice Society because of the injustice of what happened to his wife. He wanted to make sure that injustices never happened to anyone again. In my opinion, he’s the hero of this story because he’s trying to do something that is seismically changing the way that society interacts with each other and trying to make a better world to live in. He just happens to go about it in a violent and aggressive manner. He’s the only person that has the strength and volition to make these hard decisions. That level of complexity in a character was fascinating to play.

PC: If you had to summarize Jordan’s journey in Season 1 in one sentence, what would it be?
Neil: He’s a man on a single-minded mission to change the world for the better.

To keep up with Neil, follow him on Twitter and Instagram. Catch new episodes of Stargirl every Tuesday at 8/7c on the CW.