I won't tell you that it's gonna be okay.

I won't tell you that it's going to be okay.

And welcome to another episode of the Bakari Sellers podcast.

Today we have none other than Dan J. Johnson joining us.

How you feeling today, man? I'm feeling great. Thanks for having me.

Good. You know it's pretty cool. I've had a kind of it's a whole lot of new shows coming out

where out of the pandemic, people are filming again.

I've had a lot of great actors on the show.

And one of my favorite questions for him

is this question that I asked first.

Like, explain to me the arc of your career.

And you've spent much of your career in television,

but what was your first big role?

And at what point did you realize that,

you know, people may actually pay me to do this?

The arc of my career, I would say it started when I used to do speech and debate at Western Kentucky University.

The Hill Toppers, go Hill Toppers. Oh yeah, yeah you know it. I spent two years there doing speech and debate and I wasn't a because of that that speech program is a very rigorous program. I wasn't really able to audition for plays on campus.

And so I transferred up to the Paul University, the theater school at the Paul University,

went through the acting program and the first role that I got was a series called Underemployed and it was written and show run by Craig Wright who's a playwright and

Coincidentally I had done a couple of his scenes throughout the

theatre school my time at the theatre school and so it was just kind of serendipitous that I was

my first big kind of like television series was was run by him and I think that was the first time I don't I mean even even today I'm still like people really going to pay me to do this

...