We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Charis Ann Jeffers a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Charis Ann, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

In 2020, I left my restaurant job after 14 years in the food service industry. People tell you that as an actor, serving is the best survival job because of the perceived flexibility and easy money but neither of those are true. I loved a couple of the places I worked at and found some of my best friends there, but no matter what restaurant you’re in, having things demanded of you for hours on end day after day often by people who are cursing and yelling at you for $2.13 an hour (not to mention depending on tips from those people to pay your bills), will slowly wear away at your humanity. Those jobs are also much more inflexible than they’re perceived to be and I realized I was scheduling my career around a survival job that elicited panic attacks and that left me with no motivation for anything else in my life. I had to get out but I was also terrified of being financially unstable. So, I started working for a friend’s start up company and despite my strong aversion to sharing a living space, I got a roommate. When the start up fizzled out after almost a year, I signed up for Task Rabbit and Wag and worked as many odd jobs as possible. Soon some of those became regular jobs and then through a friend, I found my way into nannying and babysitting. Right when that happened, I booked my first network tv role. The next month, I was able to produce a short film I wrote with the money I made from that first tv job. Three months later, I booked another network tv job but this time as a recurring character. Four months later, I booked my first gust star tv role and my babysitting jobs requested more hours from me. I suddenly found myself financially stable enough to quit all my side jobs besides babysitting and to live on my own again, just shy of two years from quitting the restaurant. The past two years have consisted of constant risk-taking and sometimes paralyzing anxiety, but I’ve found that every time I’ve let go of something that was no longer working for me, the things I was ultimately working towards started showing up in my life. It’s still terrifying and I’ve now turned into a Google spreadsheets aficionado for budgeting my finances down to the penny, but I’m the happiest I’ve been in a long time.

Charis Ann, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m an actor, writer, producer, and co-founder of the newly established production company 4th & Burke. I knew immediately after watching Lord of the Rings at eleven-years-old that I wanted to be an actor but I didn’t realize I wanted to make my own movies until my mid-twenties. As a kid I was passionate about writing as well as acting but I didn’t think of it as an attainable career the way I did with acting. But after a few years of auditioning, I realized that I was not often perceived as the person I felt like and knew myself to be. And then, in 2016, after watching one too many videos of Kate McKinnon talking about cats, I realized I was gay and began coming out to myself and to the people in my life. My awareness of the lack of accurate representation of queerness in film and tv was suddenly sharpened and I realized that if I was ever going to play the roles I wanted to play and see the movies I wanted to see, I needed to make them myself. The older I get and the more I think back over the content I’ve consumed over the years, it becomes more and more apparent that film and tv greatly inform the way we view ourselves and how we conceptualize our place in the world around us. If we don’t see ourselves represented in media, it becomes very easy to internalize a sense of otherness and lack of belonging in the very world we live in. This led me to the concept for a feature film about family tensions that unfold around a lesbian couple in the days leading up to their wedding. I sat on that idea for several years until I finally wrote the feature. I still didn’t know what to do next though. In 2020, I decided to take a content creation class with Jono Mitchell that was specifically geared to making short films. I wrote a short version of my feature for that class and a year and a half later, I was able to produce it and act in it. It was directed by Alexandra Faith, my friend and now co-founder of our production company. Alexandra and I met in acting class in North Carolina about 12 years ago. She’s an excellent actor and writer and had previous experience as a producer so at the beginning of 2020, we banded together to begin creating content we want to see. She already wanted to have a production company called 4th & Burke, in honor of the original location of our North Carolina acting studio and so now here we are; a whole production company with a short film under our belts and looking forward to diving into our next projects.

We’re really excited about the festivals we’ve been accepted to so far and can’t wait to share what those are and are excited for more to come!

Is there a mission driving your creative journey?

The main goal and mission driving my creative journey is to give a platform to voices and stories that haven’t been the default in film and tv. I know that a lack of queer representation in film and tv growing up definitely contributed to my inability to value myself and recognize my own worth and I know that when I did start coming out, I turned to film and tv to provide context for understanding myself and reassurance that I wasn’t alone. It’s painful to have the content we consume reinforce that a certain way of being and living and looking is assumed as the societal default and that anyone different is less than. I’m inspired by production companies like Ava Duverany’s ARRAY which focuses on giving a platform to women filmmakers and specifically women of color. If it’s always straight cis white dudes holding the pen and behind the camera, those are the stories and perspectives we’re going to keep getting and the world is so much bigger than that. I also want to make queer content that I would have been allowed to watch as a kid and that people in my family and from my past would watch. I remember having to skip the kissing scene in Princess Diaries as a kid at one of my birthday parties so like, straight or gay, there are people from my life who are going to be uncomfortable with sexuality in any form which means they’ll never make it to the really powerful, moving messages in some queer content nor would I have been permitted to watch it as a kid. So, not with every project, but I do want to make family friendly queer content. Like, if I had had Happiest Season along with Lord of the Rings as an eleven-year-old, maybe I would’ve figured out why I rewatched the Arwen and Eowyn scenes over and over and over and over a little sooner.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I’ve had to unlearn, and am continuing to unlearn, that my existence should be an apology. I grew up in an environment where being gay is a sin condemnable to hell and where women are supposed to be meek and gentle and modest and responsible for men’s sexuality. The older I get, the more I realize how much I internalized those mindsets. It spills over into my everyday ability to say what I’m thinking and feeling and certainly into my ability to ask for what I want and need. Producing a short film and having to make final decisions and be in charge was my absolute worst nightmare. But I did it and ever since then have been committed to continuing that journey of unlearning the things I think I need to be sorry for. When apology is a state of being that you’ve internalized, it’s not enough to realize that’s what’s happening, it takes very intentional work to purge that from your system. It still makes me cringe to send an email or text saying no or asking for anything without a “so sorry lol no worries if not lol” included but it’s also changing my life to realize that the life I want, and asking for it, is not bad.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @carrotsannjeffers @fourthandburke

Image Credits
Tara Gulledge Jenn Stilley Torey Haas Amber Bournett-McClain