Before ghost star Brandon Scott Jones as an actor, he plays tennis competitively. But he never achieved professional success, possibly because he was too team-oriented. “Sometimes I go to court and support my opponents, because these are also my friends. And the thought of competing with them doesn’t sit well with me,” he said on a recent Zoom call. “I don’t have the ruthless element – and that’s the problem.”
The same qualities that kept Jones away from the Challenger circuit may have been responsible for his Hollywood breakthrough. ghost, recently wrapped its third season on CBS, following Sam (Rose McIver) and Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar), a couple running a struggling bed and breakfast in a Hudson Valley mansion that just happens to be teeming with genuine souls. (Sam can see and talk to them; Jay can’t.) This movie is a throwback in many ways: It’s a fun hangout comedy, a serialized story that runs about 20 episodes at a time. seasons (at least when those seasons aren’t happening). not shortened by strikes) and a real television network fight.
Perhaps most importantly, it’s a truly ensemble effort — the kind of show where every actor not only tries to deliver punchlines but also arranges them so their co-stars look good. And no one does it better than Jones, who plays the ghost of a flamboyant Revolutionary War general named Isaac Higgintoot.
Isaac has an inflated sense of his own importance and the ability to make living people smell ghostly farts. In less dexterous hands, he could easily have been a character with a joke or maybe two. But in Jones’s, he’s both goofy and soulful, laughing at even the silliest, funniest set pieces (last season, for reasons we don’t need to get into, Isaac became possessed childishly with dinosaurs) and emotions from the characters. Deep insecurity.
It’s a part that appears to have been written for Jones, who has filmed scenes in many of the most beloved comedies of the past 10 years—bits above girl And large city, an arc like one Perez Hilton–esque blogger gossip above Good Place, an important supporting role on The other two. But Jones didn’t feel that way when he first auditioned. “I think I even called my manager at the time and I said, ‘I don’t think it’s going well,’” he recalls. “I went to the Taco Bell across from the casting office and ate to my heart’s content.”
Funny enough, Jones seems very much a creature of the new millennium; To quote a viral tweet, he has the face of someone who knows what an iPhone is. The actor was understandably worried that the show’s casting director wouldn’t see him as an 18th century soldier. However, he was able to lean on the script’s hints about Isaac’s strange sexuality — something the character himself has repressed for more than 200 years.
