Actor, writer, producer, showrunner — Fort Worth native Jordan E. Cooper can do it all, and he’s got the awards to show for it, not to mention a role in the new Disney film Freakier Friday. But at heart, Cooper says, he’s just a storyteller.
RICH LOPEZ | Staff writer
Rich@DallasVoice.com
Jordan E. Cooper may have been based in New York since he was a teenager, but North Texas cannot sleep on one of its own. All before the age of 30, Cooper opened his first off-Broadway play, Ain’t No Mo’, that made him the youngest Black American playwright in Broadway history and earned him an Obie Award. He then earned Tony nominations for the show.
He was also the co-creator and executive producing show-runner of The Ms. Pat Show at 24 years old. In 2024, he was named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list alongside the likes of Kendall Jenner and Jenna Ortega.
And for the last two weeks, the now-30-year-old has been seen on the big screen in Disney’s Freakier Friday starring Oscar-winner Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan.
All this is a long way from the Fort Worth home he lived in with his family while growing up.
“I started out writing plays in my living room,” Cooper recalled. “I would invite family and then the neighborhood to come see.
“As they grew, we put them on at my church and eventually rented space in downtown Fort Worth.”
He connected with Jubilee Theatre, first as a volunteer, to see shows. But soon after, he was the company’s artist-in-residence and assistant-directed a number of Jubilee’s shows. Jubilee then produced one of his early shows, Black Boy Fly.
“We had a pay-what-you-can performance, and that money got me to school in New York. And there I really took advantage of the community and school resources,” he said.
Cooper wrote Ain’t No Mo’ in his junior year of college. The show opened in 2022 with the help of Oscar-nominated director Lee Daniels on board as producer along with RuPaul, Dwayne Wade, Gabrielle Union and Lena Waithe.
And all the while, he’s been keeping it Black and queer.
“I love presenting that intersection of Black and queerness. Black queer folks get forgotten first by the country itself, but then by Black Americans. Black Americans shoved that into a corner, and so I want to present that as much as I can,” he said.
Cooper is currently working on his own interpretation of the Noah’s Ark story with his new show, Oh Happy Day!
“I’m focused on that now, which deals with those topics of queerness in the church and religion,” he said.
But he is also riding high with the premiere of his highest-profile gig to date: In Freakier Friday, Cooper plays Jett, assistant to Lohan’s character, Anna. He was in Fort Worth last week to see the film with his family.
“They cheered when I was on screen,” he said with a laugh. “It’s all been really cool to be part of this huge project. That this movie is all over the world is wild. I felt so humbled, and excited, too, to deliver what they cast me for.”
He’s proud of the fact that the film is so woman-centric as well.
“Not only are Jamie and Linsday the big stars, but the film has a female screenwriter (Jordan Weiss) and a female director (Nisha Ganatra), so I love that it’s a big hit for women,” he said.
Be it acting, writing, directing or even showrunning, Cooper has made his own dreams come true, but…
“There are still dreams to come true,” he said. “There are so many more things I can’t wait to tackle, and I feel like I’m just getting started. I love stories, and that’s really what I am — a storyteller,” he said.