Before Ghosts star Brandon Scott Jones was an actor, he played competitive tennis. But he never made it to the pros, possibly because he’s just too much of a team player. “I was taking the court sometimes and rooting for my opponent, because these were my friends as well. And the thought of competing against them just didn’t sit well with me,” he says during a recent Zoom call. “I didn’t have the ruthless factor—and that was the problem.”
The same quality that kept Jones off the Challenger circuit may be responsible for his Hollywood breakthrough. Ghosts, which recently wrapped its third season on CBS, follows Sam (Rose McIver) and Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar), a couple running a struggling B&B in a Hudson Valley mansion that just happens to be crawling with the titular spirits. (Sam can see and speak with them; Jay can’t.) The series is a throwback in more ways than one: It’s a genial hangout comedy, a serialized saga that runs for around 20 episodes a season (at least when those seasons aren’t shortened by strikes), and a bona fide network-television hit.
Perhaps most importantly, it’s a true ensemble effort—the kind of show where every actor is gunning not only to land punch lines, but to set them up so their costars look good. And nobody is better at either than Jones, who plays the ghost of a pompous Revolutionary War general named Isaac Higgintoot.
Isaac has an inflated sense of his own importance and the power to make living people smell phantom farts. In less deft hands, he easily could have been a one- or maybe two-joke character. But in Jones’s, he’s equal parts silly and soulful, wringing belly laughs out of even the goofiest, sitcommiest premises (this past season, for reasons we don’t need to get into, Isaac became childishly obsessed with dinosaurs) and pathos from the character’s deep-seated insecurity.
It’s a part that seems as if it had been written for Jones, who’s stolen scenes on many of the most beloved comedies of the last 10 years—bit parts on Girls and Broad City, an arc as a Perez Hilton–esque gossip blogger on The Good Place, a key supporting role on The Other Two. But Jones didn’t feel that way when he first auditioned for the role. “I think I even called my managers at the time and I was like, ‘I don’t think this went well,’” he remembers. “I went over to the Taco Bell across the street from the casting office, and I ate my feelings.”
Funny as he is, Jones seems very much a creature of the new millennium; to quote a viral tweet, he has the face of someone who knows what an iPhone is. The actor was understandably nervous that the show’s casting director wouldn’t see him as an 18th-century soldier. He could, however, lean into the script’s hints about Isaac’s queer sexuality—something that the character himself had been repressing for 200-plus years.
