One Nightstand With Jay Ellis

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at The Blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

“I always read before bed,” says Jay Ellis, star of Insecure, Running Point, and Top Gun: Maverick. “The frustrations, the excitements, the work, whatever it may be, it all kind of melts away. You get to disappear in this thing for a little bit. You just get to be fully present with this story and these characters.”

Ellis put his love of reading to good use in creating his literary debut, Did Everyone Have an Imaginary Friend (or Just Me)?: Adventures in Boyhood, now out in paperback. Part- memoir, part- essay collection, Ellis recounts his experience growing up with an imaginary friend, Mikey, who helped him navigate a childhood in which his family often relocated due to his father’s work in the military.

“I bounced around a lot in the summers as a kid,” says Ellis, 43. “My parents had me as teenagers. They couldn’t afford child care. Both my grandparents, paternal and maternal, were retired, so they would send me to go be with them in the summers and I would just ping-pong back and forth.

“I was in a place where I didn’t know a lot of kids, and so the thing to fill my time was reading. If it was a crazy hot day in Sacramento, California, or Youngstown, Ohio, or Tampa, Florida, I could just sit and read all day long, as long as I was quiet and didn’t bother nobody. So I started to fall in love with just disappearing in these stories and these characters and these people in these worlds.”

Many of Ellis’ favorite books also touch on escapist themes, and his mother recommended his first pick, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. “I was out of college, I was living in LA. I must have been mid-20twenties, late 20twenties, when she gave it to me and I remember being like, ‘Oh, this is cool… Does she think I’m lost?’

“But by the end of it, I was like, ‘Oh, I get it.’ It feels so cliche to say, but this book, I think, was really one of the first times where I started to realize, ‘Oh, every kind of detour was really an experience for you and shaped the person you’ve become.’”

Ellis read his second pick, All About Love by bell hooks, after the first season of Insecure. “I had heard about it quite a bit before, but I was like, ‘I don’t need to read no book about love., I’m a man, I don’t do that,’” he says. “But this book for me really just kind of opened my eyes to meeting people where they are and loving them for who they are. At a certain point, I just have to go: Hey, you’re you. Now I get to choose. Do I love this you? Or do I distance myself from this you? And if I love this you, and if we’re open and clearly communicating, then we can maybe choose a path together.”

The book helped him get in touch with his character on Insecure. “I did not want to play Lawrence,” he says. “Letm me back up. I wanted to play Lawrence, I did. But the emotional, vulnerable, walled-off side of Lawrence that gets opened up in that show is what I was terrified to play.”

His third selection is another non-fiction classic: The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama, an expansion on the ideas of hope and unity that the then-senator outlined in his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address, which catapulted him onto the national stage. “It’s the first time where I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to read a book by a politician,’” he says. “I remember listening to a speech and going like, ‘Oh, I want to know more about this young senator from Illinois.’”

If Obama’s book argues for an American utopia, Ellis’ fourth pick, Chain-Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, veers more dystopian. “All these prisoners are essentially fighting on livestreams for prizes, like gladiators,” says Ellis of the plot, in which prisoners are routinely executed in these fights to the death. “His characters are all wildly different, and in a weird way, they are all someone familiar.”

“But I also think what’s interesting is the kind of lens at which he talks about our incarceration system,” says Ellis. “It’s doing it in a novel and obviously with lots of liberties, but when you really boil down to it, it’s a fun read.”

Ellis’ final selection comes from the author who turned him onto fiction: Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead. “I don’t know that I was a novel reader until I read Colson Whitehead,” says Ellis. “It’s because I was like, ‘Oh, that kid looks like me. That kid feels like me. I understand a little bit of that kid’s journey. It kind of feels like my journey.’

“It’s told in these three different sections, but I think it reads so cinematic. I feel like I am driving through Spanish Harlem, and it literally feels like it just jumps off the page.”

Watch the full interview below.