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Seeing someone’s clapping butt cheeks repeatedly on screen will have you believing that you know a little something about them. But that’s not true. Certainly not for actor Jay Ellis.
We know Lawrence but Ellis has been intentional about keeping several aspects of his personal life on lock. Recently, in an interview with ESSENCE he shared the reason why, along with his thoughts on a few other subjects.
Last year, we reported that Ellis not only welcomed a child with his longtime girlfriend Nina Senicar, the two were also engaged. But until the birth of his now five-month-old daughter, it was fact many people didn’t know. Ellis refers to the distinction between his personal and professional lives, “separation of church and state.”
Keeping his personal life private
“I have always been like, ‘Yo, my family is the one thing on this planet, when it’s all said and done, if it goes away today or tomorrow, it’s the only thing that I have that’s mine,’” Ellis continues. “I never want my family to ever feel they had to sacrifice. …I never want that dynamic to change because at the end of the day, as we’re watching right now in this moment, stuff comes and goes fast.”
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Ellis said the whole was blown out of proportion before elaborating. “We all have to realize, especially in this industry, we are all artists. We all view ourselves in a certain way. If you don’t, you wouldn’t be an actor. You wouldn’t be in front of a camera…We all have different personality types, and we’re all triggered by different things.”
Fatherhood
“When you’re pushed to the limits, whether it’s personally…with a baby, and you’re up all night, or whether it’s with work, you start to realize your limits aren’t what you thought they were. You get tired and you break down. You need a nap, you might cry, want to be held, whatever it is. But mentally and physically, you’re probably stronger than what you actually thought you were,” he adds. “That’s one of the biggest things that I took away from it: I can do this. This is going to hurt. My eyes are going to burn because I’m tired, but I can actually do it, and nothing has to suffer. I didn’t want to not be there for my baby. I wanted as much chest-to-chest time as I could get. I wanted all the bottles. I wanted all the diapers.”
Taking time to be still
“When everything kind of hit,” referring to the lockdown in California due to the spread of coronavirus, “it was the first week this year that I had not been on a plane. I was back and forth to New Orleans every week, and I was just so exhausted that God was like, You need to sit down, and this is the week to do it… I’m just trying constantly, in these quieter moments by myself, to create ways to make space for myself every single day.”
