Lee Jackson teaches a movie appreciation class at Tyler Legacy High School, Art 1 and Media. Friday Night Lights is the first film he shows the class every semester – fitting for the football team’s safeties coach. Buzz Bissinger’s 1990 book and the movie adaptation of a season with the Odessa Permian Panthers is the cultural touchstone Texans point to when asked what high school football means to their state. Perfect for a movie appreciation class.
When it ends, Jackson passes out test papers. Every student gets the same bonus question: What actor played Ivory Christian, a.k.a. ‘Preacher Man’, the intense and quiet linebacker that towers above the rest of the team?
Aside from the few football players, no one in the class ever correctly guesses that it was their teacher, Coach Jackson. They don’t believe it until their teacher Googles the cast on the projector and shows them a picture of his IMDb headshot from 20 years ago, without the gray speckles in his goatee.
It gets easier every year to pull that stunt. Friday Night Lights was a box office smash that sparked a television series, but it was still released in 2004 before everyone in the high school was born.
“A lot of our kids have never seen it, if you can believe that,” Tyler Legacy head coach Beau Trahan said.
But whenever a college coach stops by Tyler Legacy for a recruiting visit and goes down the line shaking the coaches’ hands, they always pause in front of the 6-foot-4 Jackson, who could still pass for a Division I athlete if you gave him a helmet and shoulder pads.
“Gah, you look familiar,” they always say.
That’s when he introduces himself as Lee Jackson, a former University of Texas football player who starred in Friday Night Lights in his only acting job ever, then became a high school coach.
Jackson could settle for these random moments when he’s recognized, but instead, his staff tells the Tyler Legacy team about the movie, and he plays it for all his students. Jackson’s performance helped entertain the world for 118 minutes. But it’s more impactful for his kids once Jackson tells them about the life he spent up to that point attempting to escape a broken home. He’s thankful for the movie not as some vanity project or interesting trivia fact, but because it’s a vehicle for helping the next high schooler like himself.
“When I come in, coaches tell them, ‘He was in Friday Night Lights,’” Jackson said. “Yeah, I was in it. But this is what I went through before I got to that point. When they hear my life story, it’s like, ‘Dang, I can make it. Coach made it.’ To see my kids go to college and make it out of their home situation, that fulfills me.”