Jayson Warner Smith as Wendell Jelks in "Rectify". Photo by Blake Tyers.
You may not recognize his name yet, but if you watch movies or television at all you may have seen Jayson Warner Smith a time or two. He played a police officer in 2011’s Footloose remake and has a small role as a gas station attendant in 42, the new film based on the life of Jackie Robinson. But when the Sundance Channel debuts its first original series Rectify on April 22, Smith’s acting skills will be showcased on almost a weekly basis as he plays an inmate named Wendell Jelks, who resides miserably in the cell next to Daniel Holden (Aden Young), the show’s main character.
While Daniel takes a more meditative approach to serving his prison sentence, Wendell is a bitter man who wants to make sure that everyone around him is just as despondent as he is.
“I wake up every day and decide what I can do to mess with these guys today,” Smith said prior to Rectify‘s red carpet premiere at the Atlanta Film Festival last month. “That’s basically my job. The six episodes basically encompass the first seven days of Daniel’s life after he gets out of prison. He’s locked up for 19 years from the age of 18 to 37 and he’s dealing with all the things that have happened over the last 20 years that you and I would take for granted. My part is all flashbacks from when he was in The Pen – total isolation, death row, every day we could die.”
During several flashbacks that take place during the first few episodes, Wendell is like the devil on one of Daniel’s shoulders while Johnny Ray Gill provides a more positive outlook from Daniel’s other adjacent cell. The show, which was shopped around for several years, is set in a small Georgia town not far from Smith’s hometown of Atlanta. And when show creator Ray McKinnon started holding auditions, Smith knew he wanted to be involved with the show.
Photo by Blake Tyers.
“The nice part was Ray wrote this amazing script three or four years ago,” says Smith. “It got shopped around and was at AMC or a while, then at HBO, then Walton Goggins was going to be the star, then he got on Justified, and now here we are. Ray’s a big believer in doing it real, doing it right and doing it here. I’m an Atlanta native, I’ve lived here all my life, I’ve been acting since I was nine years old. Ray and I have known each other for years and I heard about the audition and called my agent and said, ‘Why am I not reading for this?’ She said, ‘You don’t really fit that part.’ I said, ‘No, I’m going to read for this.’ Ray called me in and spent an hour with me helping me prepare for my final audition for the producers. So I guess he believed in me and I want to kiss him on the lips every time I see him. It’s been a great opportunity.”
You can also see Smith in BET‘s Being Mary Jane, out later this spring, and Anchorman: The Legend Continues, due to hit theaters this December.