If you’ve seen the Emmy-winning sitcomAbbott Elementary, you’ll know William Stanford Davis as the prickly, well-travelled janitor who occasionally tosses out conspiracy theories but is beloved by children and faculty members alike. Davis was supposed to be in only a few episodes of the first season, but he became a fan favourite so quickly that the showrunners decided to make him a series regular in season two. Now in his early 70s, Davis has been working towards this moment for decades. In an interview with Far Out, he talked about falling in love with movies as a child, the disastrous audition for Friends that changed his approach to his craft, and how Abbott Elementary has finally made him feel like he has a home in his profession.
Davis grew up in St Louis, Missouri, far away from Hollywood and the entertainment industry. But his grandmother introduced him to cinema and live performance from an early age. She would pick him up from school early some days and take him to the movies, the opera, or the symphony, telling the principal that he had a doctor’s appointment. “It would be like a little date,” he says, chuckling. The first movie he remembered seeing was the 1958 Stanley Kramer movie The Defiant Ones.
“That’s the first one I remember that stuck with me,” he says. “And I think because Sidney Poitier was in it. Then I saw him years later in A Raisin in the Sun, and I just knew somehow, that’s what I wanted to do.” The trouble was, he didn’t know how he was going to do it. As far as he knew, there weren’t any acting classes where he lived, and Hollywood was halfway across the country. He did a series of non-acting jobs to get by. He worked in a brickyard, he worked as a limousine driver, and he worked as a telemarketing manager, to name but a few, but he always kept his eye on the ball.
“I did all those things to try to survive because this is what I really wanted,” he explained. “I didn’t want anything that was going to lock me in, you know, in terms of something I could really walk away from and not have any regrets.”
The first acting job he got that secured him a coveted union membership was in the television soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful in 1995, playing, ironically enough, a janitor. The next year, he was brought in again to play – you guessed it – a janitor, though not the same one. Slowly but surely, he began to book small roles here and there on various television series. At some point in the late ’90s, however, he had an audition that was so scarring that it changed his life. It was for the generational hit Friends. The role he was reading for was small, but according to the people he auditioned for, he was a disaster.
Credit: Far Out / Press
“They said I was terrible,” he remembers. “They said it was the worst—They said I shouldn’t be acting. I won’t tell you all the things they said, but they said that this guy, you know, he didn’t know what he was doing, and I decided that was never going to be said again.”
Rather than give up acting, he decided to master the craft. He joined the Actors Studio, a membership organisation where actors work together in a peer-to-peer environment. It’s where luminaries such as Marlon Brando, Sidney Poitier, Anne Bancroft, and Robert De Niro developed and honed their skills, and it’s famous for utilising the method acting technique.
“I really started working on my craft,” Davis says, “I was determined that no one would ever give that type of feedback again about me. And that changed my life.”
The great Martin Landau became his mentor and helped reframe the acting process in a way that was nothing short of revelatory. “One thing he said was that every experience we have in life is filtered through our five senses,” Davis says. “That made sense to me because then it made me understand what behaviour really is. Everything we do, the slightest little thing, is specific.”
The other major benefit he got from joining the Actors Studio was the opportunity to spend time with some of the greatest actors working in Hollywood. “I looked up, and Elliott Gould was sitting next to me, or Al Pacino was teaching the class or something,” he says, adding, “You’re in the company of these giants, and they treat you as a peer, instead of you looking up to them, or them looking down to you or whatever. And they would always give me something constructive, something that would help my work go a little further.”
After years of working as a guest star on television shows, this collegial environment was no small thing. “I’ve always said when you’re a guest star on a show, it’s like being a guest in someone’s home,” Davis says. “You want to go in and make the best impression possible. You don’t want to knock over the furniture, and you want to stay out of the way.”
The first job he got that allowed him to capitalise on all the work he was doing at the Actors Studio was on the television series The Practice in 1999. This time, he had a slightly larger part, playing a key character in the B plot of the episode. “That experience was like, ‘Oh, my God. Oh, this is what I want,’” he remembers, adding, “‘This is where I’m supposed to be.’ I remember that like it was yesterday. When they told me I booked the job, I really got emotional about it because I put in the work prepping for it, and I’m really proud of the work that I did.”
When he got the role in Abbott Elementary, he had a feeling the show was going to be a success. The script was sharp, and the cast was top-tier. But he was completely unprepared for the reception he received. All of a sudden, he’d be out grabbing coffee, and strangers would approach him to tell him how much they loved him in the show. At one point, one of the producers came up to him on set and said, “You know you’re a fan favourite, right?” Still, he wasn’t about to get his hopes up. He was an industry veteran at that point and knew that the chances of becoming a permanent member of the cast were slim.
Around episode seven, however, Quinta Brunson, the series star and creator, told him that they were planning to make him a series regular. “That changed everything,” he says. “That just changed my life.” It wasn’t that he’d felt like an afterthought or an unwelcome outsider, but to go back to his previous analogy, he still always felt like a guest on someone else’s turf. “When she said that,” he remembers, “I really felt like I was at home. I had become very close to the cast anyway, but I started feeling like, ‘Okay, man, this feels like, this feels like the place where you live.’”
These days, Davis is getting more work than ever. Aside from his increasingly central role in Abbott Elementary, which is nearing the end of its fourth season and is already renewed for a fifth, he’s finished shooting a film with Wanda Sykes in Puerto Rico called Undercard and is set to appear in a movie with Danny Glover. At this point, it’s more a matter of finding enough time in his schedule than finding good parts.
Between seasons of Abbott, Davis is hoping to continue doing more movies, but he’d also like to bring it full circle to the stage productions he went to see with his grandmother in St Louis. “I love doing theatre,” he says, “And I’m hoping that I get an opportunity to do maybe a couple of August Wilson pieces on Broadway.”
