Lee Jackson teaches a movie appreciation class at Tyler Legacy High School, Art 1 and Media. Friday Night Lights is the first film he shows the class every semester – fitting for the football team’s safeties coach. Buzz Bissinger’s 1990 book and the movie adaptation of a season with the Odessa Permian Panthers is the cultural touchstone Texans point to when asked what high school football means to their state. Perfect for a movie appreciation class.

When it ends, Jackson passes out test papers. Every student gets the same bonus question: What actor played Ivory Christian, a.k.a. ‘Preacher Man’, the intense and quiet linebacker that towers above the rest of the team?

Aside from the few football players, no one in the class ever correctly guesses that it was their teacher, Coach Jackson. They don’t believe it until their teacher Googles the cast on the projector and shows them a picture of his IMDb headshot from 20 years ago, without the gray speckles in his goatee.

It gets easier every year to pull that stunt. Friday Night Lights was a box office smash that sparked a television series, but it was still released in 2004 before everyone in the high school was born.

“A lot of our kids have never seen it, if you can believe that,” Tyler Legacy head coach Beau Trahan said.

But whenever a college coach stops by Tyler Legacy for a recruiting visit and goes down the line shaking the coaches’ hands, they always pause in front of the 6-foot-4 Jackson, who could still pass for a Division I athlete if you gave him a helmet and shoulder pads.

“Gah, you look familiar,” they always say.

That’s when he introduces himself as Lee Jackson, a former University of Texas football player who starred in Friday Night Lights in his only acting job ever, then became a high school coach.

Jackson could settle for these random moments when he’s recognized, but instead, his staff tells the Tyler Legacy team about the movie, and he plays it for all his students. Jackson’s performance helped entertain the world for 118 minutes. But it’s more impactful for his kids once Jackson tells them about the life he spent up to that point attempting to escape a broken home. He’s thankful for the movie not as some vanity project or interesting trivia fact, but because it’s a vehicle for helping the next high schooler like himself.

“When I come in, coaches tell them, ‘He was in Friday Night Lights,’” Jackson said. “Yeah, I was in it. But this is what I went through before I got to that point. When they hear my life story, it’s like, ‘Dang, I can make it. Coach made it.’ To see my kids go to college and make it out of their home situation, that fulfills me.”

Lee Jackson never dreamed of becoming a movie star. He wanted to be a kindergarten teacher in college. On Saturdays, he was a safety for the Texas Longhorns in front of 100,000 people. Come weekdays, he was a student teacher at the local Austin elementary schools for 20 rambunctious kids. His own kindergarten teacher had taken on an outsized role in raising him – getting him clothes, feeding him, making sure he was ok. His goal was to do the same for someone else.

Jackson was born in Longview to a mother who chose to lean on drugs in the hard times of raising kids by herself, starting off with marijuana and graduating when she needed something stronger. Her son saw her overdose and get beat up by dealers, but one of the worst feelings was the month or two she’d disappear and leave him wondering if she was dead. She was in and out of the house, in and out of rehab, in and out of jail.

At Jackson’s audition for Ivory Christian, Friday Night Lights director Peter Berg instructed him to act like he was leading the team in the Lord’s Prayer before the big game. Berg was blown away by how natural Jackson sounded. Jackson wasn’t as stoic in real life as the character he portrayed, but he did relate with the Preacher Man’s spirituality. After his mother returned from a five-year prison sentence during his junior year of high school, Jackson, by then the No.1-ranked defensive back in the state, decided he’d turn to God instead of drugs.

Jackson was part of Texas head coach Mack Brown’s inaugural recruiting class in 1998, and by his sophomore year earned UT’s ‘Outstanding Defensive Newcomer’ as a starting safety. But he tore his quad in the Cotton Bowl against Arkansas, the first of many injuries that would plague his career.

That winter he returned to Longview, but his mom wasn’t home. When Jackson asked his stepdad about it, he told him it’d be easier to show him than tell him. Jackson got in his car and followed him to the bad part of Longview, to a crack house he knew about all too well and saw his mother walking out with another junkie. All this time he’d been in college thinking his mom was better. Here was proof she wasn’t. He drove back home, walked into his kitchen and tried to end his life at its lowest point.

In that moment he felt God’s hand on his shoulder and a voice in his ear saying, “Lee-J, do not do it. I have so much in store for you.”

There’s a famous speech in Friday Night Lights that Permian head coach Gary Gaines gives his team at halftime of the state championship game. After a year spent demanding perfection, he tells them that being perfect is about your relationship with your family and friends, giving all you have, not about winning state. Jackson’s taken that advice in his own life.

“People always talked to me like, ‘Is walking with God about being perfect?’” Jackson said. “It wasn’t about being perfect for me. It was about needing somebody to watch over and protect me and who I knew was always going to be there for me.”

Jackson sees God’s will woven through the fabric of his life in all the crazy twists and turns. He finished his Texas career at linebacker in the 2002 Cotton Bowl with two fumble recoveries, one for a 46-yard touchdown. After a stint in training camp with the Tennessee Titans, he returned to Austin to finish his degree. There, Jackson and former UT teammates Tyrone Jones, Everick Rawls and Alfio Randall decided one day to head downtown to the Omni Hotel and audition as football stunt doubles for a new movie. The stunt coordinator pulled Jackson out of line and urged him to audition for a few speaking parts.

After three rounds of auditions, Jackson landed a role in what would become one of the most popular sports movies of the 21st century.

“I got to the set, and they were like, ‘Your trailer is on Lot B,’” Jackson said. “I have a trailer to myself, and I was like, ‘Wow.’ That’s when I realized I done stumbled into something big.”

Whereas the rest of the team consisted of Hollywood actors as high school football players, Jackson was a legit football player. His lack of dialogue, abundance of glowering stares and seemingly superhuman physique brought a domineering presence to the film.

“Preacher is like 6’8, 400 pounds the way he’s filmed," Ringer founder Bill Simmons said on a Rewatchables podcast of the movie. "He’s basically Myles Garrett as an 18-year-old.” 

But Jackson showed acting chops, too, like his blowup speech to the team during halftime of the state championship, more lines in 15 seconds than he had in the entire movie. While he never got to meet the real Ivory Christian on set (Christian was a truck driver), the Permian alums who attended shoot days praised Jackson for his performance.

“All the other guys were on set when we were filming out in Odessa,” Jackson said. “They were like, ‘Man, you really are portraying him how he is. He’s just not as good looking as you.’”

After the movie’s premiere, Jackson moved to California to be a full-time actor and bought a house in Sherman Oaks. But a divorce, coupled with a writers’ strike in 2007 that shut down Hollywood, halted his career. Knowing he was looking for work, his aunt sent his headshots to Ebony magazine, and they invited him to Chicago to audition for their fashion model runway show. He spent the next few years traveling around the country modeling furs, high-end clothes and even speedos.

Jackson moved back to Texas after his modeling career ended and worked for Coca-Cola for four years. The entire time, however, he was looking for a way to break into coaching. In 2018, Jackson was stocking Coca-Cola in Wal-Mart when former Texas player Kwame Cavil bumped into him. Cavil had just taken the head coaching job at Waco High and offered Jackson a spot on staff.

Jackson’s journey had brought him to acting in Hollywood and modeling in Chicago, but within a week at Waco High, where 88 percent of the student population is economically disadvantaged, he knew his life’s purpose was coaching high school football in Texas.

“I knew there were kids going through what I went through,” Jackson said. “I always wanted to be a teacher because I wanted to help like my kindergarten teacher helped me.”

In 2023, he took the safeties coach job at Tyler Legacy High School as part of Beau Trahan’s staff. The move made sense to him. Trahan was in the same recruiting class as Jackson at Texas. But the school was also less than an hour away from that kindergarten classroom in East Texas where the seed to become a teacher was first planted.

Most coaches teach a class because they have to if they want to coach. Jackson always wanted to be in the classroom as much as the football field.

He feels like he can change lives here, one Friday Night Lights screening at a time.