Jason George didn’t panic when his son told him college wasn’t in the cards. Instead, the Grey’s Anatomy vet took a breath and addressed the statement pragmatically—just as his mother did when he told her he was abandoning law for acting.
George’s son, a wicked debater, presented facts. He noted that college doesn’t guarantee employment and a bachelor’s degree is diminishing in professional returns. He also ran the numbers, showing the financial burden that strangles graduates post-matriculation.
“It’s either college or rent,” George answered calmly. “So, what’s the plan?”
George, who returned to Grey Sloan Memorial as popular character Ben after doing seven seasons on the successful spinoff, Station 19, experienced a crossroads himself at his son’s age. He was supposed to be the next Thurgood Marshall, not a thespian. His mentor back then, a highly accomplished judge in Virginia, had his roadmap to success plotted. So when he called an audible on his college major, George had to convince his mother (and the judge) that he had a sound roadmap.
His mother was an educator who taught her children to think before presenting ideas. She knew the benefits of a law profession, but Jason justified his desire to become an MFA-certified actor, citing collegiate teaching opportunities as a fallback plan and the health insurance and pensions he could secure through a union. When George was done with his presentation, Mom had no rebuttal.
Decades into an acting career that has yielded an Emmy nomination, George, 52, clearly made the right pivot. LEVEL sat with the seasoned thespian to discuss his return to Shonda Rhimes’ longest-running show and those parenting strategies he’s adopted.
LEVEL: Was acting always the end goal?
JASON GEORGE: The vice principal of my highschool was an incredible educator. He became a dear friend because he saw potential in me and saw me actually doing something with that potential. But he also saw that I could get wild and screw up. He passed away my senior year. His son [Leroy Hassel, Sr.] was a justice [of the Virginia Supreme Court] and only the second black Supreme Court justice of Virginia. He became my mentor when his father passed away. I won a scholarship in his father's name. The whole plan was to go to law school, get good grades, and he’d write the recommendation to get me into law school. I would come back, clerk for him, and I’m a made man in the state of Virginia. So I majored in Rhetoric and Communication studies [because] UVA doesn't do pre-law.
How did those law aspirations lose out to acting?
One of the things I love about [that college] is they didn’t teach you the job. They taught you how to think and then you could apply that to whatever job you do. So when they talk to you about the Constitution, they’re talking about the ideas, not just how you use it in a courtroom. But it also meant they were showing you images and movies and you're talking about how you put images together to shape an idea to make an argument, to move people. I’m literally in the same major taking classes that had me looking at the Constitution and getting my Thurgood Marshall on, and I was taking classes that had me looking at Citizen Kane and figuring out how to move you emotionally.
I've always been a movie buff, always been a cinephile. But it also was the beginning of the end because that was the gateway drug [to acting]. I went and did a play, took an acting class, and it all went to shit. It all went sideways so fast. I never told my father that I was going to go study acting, but I did have to call the judge. That's one of the hardest phone calls of my life. When I told him I was going to go to graduate school to get a masters in fine arts, he was just quiet.
What did you tell him?
I hit him up with a version of what I had said to my mom and hoped it would work as well. But I had to remember a couple of things. One, my mom always had an artist sensibility. She's sung in the church choir her whole life. She dabbled in acting in college. She loves movies and TV. But she's an educator. She would ask you questions until you realize that [what you’re telling her] is a dumb idea. So she doesn't say no. She goes, “okay, lemme ask you this.” And she just starts asking questions. And if you don't have answers, you look really stupid. Eventually I start pre-thinking her questions and coming up with answers. I had a plan when I gave her the call. I told her I'm going to get a master of fine arts degree so I really know this thing from the ground up. I will be a classically trained actor. I will know the history of this thing, truly understand it, and they pay me to come there to do it.
I'll be teaching before I get out of this program. So I'll have the skillset because part of that degree is if I'm not working as an actor, I can teach actively. And an MFA lets me teach on the collegiate level. So my mom heard teaching. Then I explained you’re not on your own because there's a union where you get your health insurance and pension plan. My mom heard union and she said, “okay, so you're not on your own.” Suddenly it stops seeming like a crazy idea from a 20-year-old.
What’s the moment when you feel you were able to go back to the judge and say this pivot actually worked?
I landed my first job on a daytime soap. And about three and a half years later I got nominated for an Emmy award for daytime. My actual father found out I was an actor so I'm signing autographs for his people in his office. I'm [also] signing autographs for people in the judge's office. It worked out…It was okay by that point. He was like, “I was worried. I was nervous for you for a second.” I said I know, sir.
You said that you’ve used your mother’s philosophy for parenting your kids. What’s an example?
My oldest son is mad smart, mad stubborn. [He wants to] bend the world to his will. There was a period where he wasn't trying to go to college. He was like college is too expensive and doesn't guarantee you a job anymore. It's never guaranteed you a job, but it doesn't even give you as good a shot at a job as it used to. That's true. He's rattling these things off. I had to come back in my skin after I exploded in my head and almost dropped a mushroom cloud on dude. I had to come back and say, “what would Ma do right now? How would Ma play this?” And I said, “okay, so you don't go to college. What's the plan?” I’ve told my kids since they were born, when you graduate high school, it's college or a plan; it's college or rent.
There’s a middle ground in there.
If you pull a Bill Gates and you have a business plan that has potential and is smart, I can invest in that. This is all about me investing in you one way or the other. So am I investing in college so you can figure more stuff out? Am I investing in a plan you got set up or what? If it is not going to be college, what are you doing? And at the time him and his boys had been talking about a fashion thing or something like that. I had yet to see the business [plan]. More and more questions got them to realize college is a place where you can go and explore yourself, the world, what you want to do, maybe find something else you want to do, go to law school, discover acting.
[College is there] to help you grow. The world ain't trying to help you grow. We're paying the money to help you grow. And the other part was it is on me. I got you. This is four years where you go and you literally explore and try everything to the max of your ability on my dime. He would have had a much better argument for what he was talking about if he had to pay for college like me or his uncles.
If you're going to start a fashion line, go start it while you're in college. Sell it out your dorm room. And if it gets so big like Bill Gates, if it gets so big that you just can't do college anymore, hey, I'll invest in that. Until then get your ass to class. Sure enough, he heard it. He heard me and my wife.
What does the audience love about your character Ben?
People fell in love with Ben because Ben fell in love with Bailey. That was the initial part. They saw a strong black man that wasn't intimidated by a strong black woman. And you can remove the word Black from that at any point—you saw a strong man, not intimidated by a strong woman. And then I think they saw Ben get inspired largely by that woman and by the folks that she was introducing him to. I've been kicking back and just collecting my money, being an anesthesiologist. Let me keep looking for new challenges. Let me keep looking for new mountains to climb.
And the way Jason will say it is, if you're not growing, you're dying. So there's always something new to learn, something new to check out. And when you start only doing the places that you know and talking about things you already know, you're shrinking. You're shrinking and slowly dying. And so I think seeing Ben trying new things made people start to root for him. That and the fact that Ben is a chill dude, but when he gets bold, it's legit. [In the show] he cuts the dude open with a clipboard. They're like, that's wrong. He's like, “dude was going to die. He needed to live. I did what I did. Say something.”
The adage if you're not learning, you're dying, is powerful. Moving away from Ben and back to Jason, talk to me about directing. Is that something new that's feeding your soul as far as learning new things?
Yeah, it really is. I mean, look, I always knew when I got my MFA I wanted to teach acting. I ran my own actress workshop for 10 years or something like that. It only died because the pandemic and my schedule made it too hard. There was nothing like seeing the actor [in my program] get their first guest star role or one of my actors got their first series regular role. Until you direct something and it's all on you and it's you've got a vision and that is a new high. One of the things I love about acting is solving puzzles and you're solving problems before the director even knows that they’re problems. As a director, you're asking that of everybody.
You're trying to solve the problem and have ideas about how to solve 'em, so it's like you see the problems way down the line and you're figuring out, okay, I need to have it solved by this point so I can work on the ones that are going to be a problem in the next three days. But I know there's other problems that are going to be a problem in seven days. And then I know there's a couple problems going to be an issue in 14 days. So I'm aware of those problems way out there, but I got to deal with the ones that are going to hit first. All that fires my brain and my heart in a way that hadn't in a while. I realized that it's reverse engineering a lot of what I've always done as an actor.