As a football star in NC, he was miserable. But he found his happy place: Hollywood

This story includes mention of suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, please visit the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. More ways to get help are listed at the bottom of this article.

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It’s possible that if certain dominoes had toppled in some very particular ways — and if he’d really, truly wanted it — Charlotte native Jake Lawler could have been playing in the NFL right now.

It’s just as conceivable, though, that if those same dominoes had fallen in much darker directions, he could have wound up dead.

As it so happens, the former UNC football player’s path led to neither outcome and today, at age 24, he is in a place no one would have imagined back when he was a star athlete at South Mecklenburg High School: in Hollywood, where Lawler is basking in the glow of the recent release of a Disney+ original series he got hired to help write last year.

The 10-episode first season of “The Crossover,” which follows two brothers navigating middle school and great expectations as promising young basketball stars, debuted on the streaming service earlier this month.

How exactly did Lawler pull off such an unlikely coup at such a young age and despite having zero prior showbiz experience?

The short answer, he explains, is simple. “Honestly, so much of it, I think, is just, like, a mix of the right place, right time, right script, right show, and my willingness to work hard for the opportunity,” he says.

The long version, meanwhile, is way more complicated — and involves a College Football Hall of Fame coach who may well have helped save his life (and who then helped Lawler get his foot in the door in L.A.); a story Lawler came up with about a Black teen with telekinesis; and an acclaimed writer and poet who took a huge chance on Lawler at least in part because of that story.

‘If you are struggling, come see us’

During high school, on paper, as an athlete, Lawler seemed to have it all.

A 4.0 grade-point average. Status as one of the nation’s top 20 defensive ends and one of the top three overall players in the state of North Carolina. Scholarship offers from more than a dozen big-time Division I programs and an eventual commitment to UNC Chapel Hill. He graduated from South Meck a semester early, in December 2016, and started his college studies early, too, enrolling just weeks later.

But as a Tar Heel, on paper, as a football player, it seemed like he wasn’t living up to his potential. He red-shirted his freshman year during the team’s 2017 campaign. As a sophomore and junior, he played in just half of the team’s 24 games.

So, yes, on paper, it seemed like his struggles started in college. In reality, however, he’d been struggling with thoughts of wanting to die since his freshman year of high school.

Lawler was very slow, and very hesitant, to open up about his depression. He says that the first person to find out — roommate and teammate Michael Carter — found out “almost accidentally,” when Carter found him in a catatonic state in their room during his freshman year at UNC. Lawler says Carter was immensely supportive and encouraging; still, he asked Carter to keep the revelation of his depression a secret. Over time, though, Lawler felt increasingly ready to seek out help.

The year everything changed for him was 2019.

What set the table was the announcement in November 2018 of the return of legendary head coach Mack Brown, who had led the Tar Heels from 1988 to 1997 and won a national championship while helming the University of Texas in 2005.

Then in May, a pivotal moment, shortly after Brown learned about a friend’s son’s suicide.

“We called a team meeting and told the story, and said, ‘Suicide is very selfish,’” the Tar Heels coach recalls. “’It’s not fair to your parents and it’s not fair to your friends. So if any of you are struggling, come and see us. Let’s talk about it.’ Jake came upstairs right afterward, said that he had some really bad thoughts a couple of nights before, and that he would like to talk to somebody.”

Lawler says Brown was able to get him a therapist that works on staff for UNC Athletics, “and lots of verbal and emotional support.”

The following month, Lawler published a 2,300-word essay detailing painful depression dating back to middle school that twice (once in high school and once in college) brought him to the brink of suicide and expressing gratitude for those who helped him get healthy.

He was flooded with DMs and responses. Writers from ESPN and Sports Illustrated picked up the story. It was, he says, “a whirlwind affair.”

But “I think that was the first moment I knew my writing was good, and it could do some good,” Lawler says. “And from there, looking at it like almost as a new-lease-on-life in a way, after getting help and the necessary assistance I needed, there was a real clarifying energy that focused my efforts toward what I wanted to do next:

“Movies and TV.”

A laser focus on going to Hollywood

Lawler traces his love of movies — specifically “the language of cinema, and storytelling” — back to age 7 or 8, when he first saw “The Iron Giant,” an animated film about a young boy who befriends a gigantic robot that fell to Earth from outer space.

The first person who told Lawler that he had potential as a creative writer, he says, was Andrae Bergeron, the South Meck High School AP English teacher who gave him the first perfect grade he’d ever gotten on a writing assignment. It was for an essay about being Black in America.

Both that love of movies and that creative-writing potential stayed relatively stifled for years. In the fall of 2019, however, as he continued sharpening focus on his mental health and his desire to follow a different path than the preordained athletic one, Lawler made three decisions in one.

He decided to apply to finish up a semester early and graduate with his degree in broadcast journalism from UNC in May 2020, to forgo his final season of football eligibility, and to try his hand at screenwriting.

When Lawler told Brown, his coach didn’t try to convince him to stay with the team. Instead, he again offered help. First, Brown promised to hook Lawler up with some people he knew in Los Angeles. (The coach has had a long and well-publicized friendship with actor Matthew McConaughey dating to his earliest years in Texas, as well as a daughter who has developed and produced films and TV shows in Hollywood and is married to the head of a small production studio in L.A.)

Then Brown gave Lawler a piece of advice. “‘If you’re gonna go somewhere or pursue something, don’t pursue it empty-handed,’” Lawler recalls Brown telling him.

So he wrote a screenplay for a pilot for a TV series in his favorite genre — science fiction — about a 17-year-old high-schooler who develops telekinesis after a freak accident.

In March 2020, he took copies of his script for “Martin Clay” with him to Los Angeles for a series of meetings that Brown helped him get.

A week later, COVID shut down the world.

For the next two months, he mostly holed up in his apartment alone soaking up everything he possibly could about movies and screenwriting via Google, via YouTube, by reading blogs, and by poring over and dissecting countless movies and TV shows, from the silent films of the ’20s to John Carpenter’s horror movies to the HBO series “Succession.”

He did take one filmmaking class at UNC, but says “I didn’t learn much, unfortunately.” So he simply taught everything to himself.

Then in May, one of those March meetings in L.A. bore fruit. Brown’s son-in-law, Luke Ryan, called to say he’d read “Martin Clay” and wanted to talk to Lawler about it. Their subsequent chats led to Ryan hiring Lawler to be his assistant. Lawler moved to California that August.

Within a year, Lawler had his own manager and his own agent, who continued to help him show off “Martin Clay.” People continued liking it.

And one of them just so happened to be in the process of developing a sports-themed TV series for Disney+.

‘He hadn’t done anything! But ...’

Kwame Alexander is the author of “The Crossover,” the 2014 children’s book that he wrote entirely in verse and which won a Newbery Medal and was a runner-up for the Coretta Scott King Award.

In January 2022, Disney+ committed to making the eight-episode first season of the series based on that book. The pilot was written by Alexander and Damani Johnson; and NBA superstar LeBron James was already on board as an executive producer of the show. The story follows twin brothers — whose dad is a former pro basketball star and whose mom is the principal of their middle school — as they navigate athletic, academic and social pressures.

Alexander and Johnson met with hundreds of writers as they built a team designed to help them get the expanded story and the dialogue just right.

Lawler had an uphill climb just to even get a serious look. Most of the candidates were seasoned Hollywood vets. Lawler’s resume?

“Pretty bleak,” Alexander recalls, chuckling. “Because he hadn’t done anything! But the script was interesting. He had a really good grasp of the craft of writing, of creative writing. So I was intrigued enough to want to meet him.”

“Martin Clay” had done it again.

When they met with Lawler, they were excited about his experience as a high-level athlete, given the type of story they were telling. They also were impressed by Lawler’s prolific movie-watching habits and his affinity for picking apart filmmaking techniques and scripts.

Alexander says what resonated with him about Lawler most, though, was his youth.

“On two levels. One, our audience is young people. I write books for young people,” he says, explaining that they thought his age could help them write scripts that were “authentic and real without being cliche.

“The other thing is, I remember starting out right after college I went on an interview at BET, and this guy told me, ‘You’re too young. You’re just gonna die on the vine.’ I remember being pissed. Thinking, ‘Just give me an opportunity. I know I can prove myself.’ I would have wanted to have someone like me in that position when I was starting out, who saw something in me.

“All of those things converged, man, and I was like, ‘Let’s just give this cat a shot.’”

Where he’s supposed to be now

Lawler was hired as the youngest of eight writers for “The Crossover.” For six of the episodes, he earned a credit as a “staff writer.” But the opening credits for Episode 4 include the words “Written for Television By Jake Lawler.”

It’s an elevated title that basically means he lead-wrote the episode. He earned it by pitching an idea for that episode that his fellow writers loved. Ultimately, it didn’t stick — Lawler had come up with something that was more sci-fi/horror than family dramedy — but Alexander and Johnson stuck with Lawler as the lead writer.

And Alexander believes this is just the beginning of a long and prosperous career. “I mean, Damani and I said that at some point, we’re gonna be looking for a job and Jake’s gonna hire us. Hopefully.”

As for the immediate future ... Lawler says he can’t say much about what he’s working on.

“The tricky, annoying thing about this business is that you can’t ever really say explicitly,” he explains. “But let’s just say that there are more things coming, and I am working with every intention to make sure that this is not a one-off.”

(There is, in case you’re wondering, no way yet to know whether Lawler would return for a second season of “The Crossover,” because Alexander and Johnson are still awaiting word on whether Disney+ will commit to one. Also: For now, “Martin Clay” remains what’s referred to in the biz as a “sample script,” which he hopes can continue to bring him good fortune.)

In some small way, he feels like he owes that intention — to make sure “The Crossover” isn’t a one-off — to the people who helped nudge him towards this life in the first place: His parents, Michele and Andrew, who still live in Charlotte. His younger brother, Conor, a recent UNC School of the Arts graduate who also is pursuing a career in film and TV. Mr. Bergeron. His roommate Michael. Coach Brown. Luke Ryan. Kwame and Damani.

In the most significant way, however, he feels like he owes it to himself to keep following his dreams.

“I had lived my life so much for so many other people,” he says of the time before he left football to focus on writing. “That served the way in which my depression works. I felt that I was a vessel for other people. But making a selfish decision really was a relief, and was very freeing, and allowed me, I think, to flourish and lock in.”

He says he’s thankful for football. That it taught him about hard work, punctuality, meeting deadlines, going above and beyond. That if he hadn’t played football, it would have taken him longer to develop those skills.

“But since I already had been doing that for so long, all it was was just sort of re-wiring my brain to reconfigure all that energy towards something that I actually wanted to do.

“And I’ll tell you, it’s —” Lawler pauses for a second, then chuckles before he continues, as if he still can’t believe he is where he is. “Everything in this life is very difficult. I think every career path is very difficult. Hollywood, especially, I think is very difficult. But if you don’t like what you’re doing, it’s just miserable.

“It’s a hell of a lot easier to go through difficult things if you actually like what you’re doing.”

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If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, visit https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/; call 1-800-273-8255 (or 988 in an emergency); or text HELP to 741741 or 988.