After graduating from Shaw University in North Carolina, Cleveland native LeJon Woods returned home and took a job working for the city. While he liked the steady income, he had an epiphany one day while sitting in his cubicle.
“I was looking at the four walls around me, and I said that the 9-to-5 life wasn’t for me,” says Woods, an accomplished actor who appears in the new Lifetime show The Christmas Listing, in a recent phone interview. It airs at 8 p.m. on Monday. “It was a blessing, and I was grateful for it, but it wasn’t me. I asked, ‘What is it that I could do that I generally love doing?’ I realized being in front of a camera is home.”
As a result, Woods reached out to Cleveland State University to see if any student directors needed actors for their films. It turned out that they did.
“I did a few films, and it kept snowballing,” says Wood. “This was around the time that the state had the tax credits for movies. There was a movie that at the time was called Boot Tracks. It became Tomorrow You’re Gone. It starred Stephen Dorff and Michael Monaghan and Willem Dafoe. I auditioned and got a role. I was speaking opposite Stephen Dorff.”
Woods got an even bigger role in 2014’s romance Old Fashioned.
“It did very well in theaters, and that’s the first time I could see myself on the big screen and ever since then, I’ve been trying to do it full-time,” says Woods, who does both comedy and drama.
For Christmas Listing, Woods plays Doug, a realator vying to purchase a hot property in Isanti, MN.
“I spent a week and a half working on it in Isanti,” he says. “Man, it was cold. The great thing about this film is that a lot of these films are sometimes shot on production sets, and it’s just not the same. It was January and February, and we had the real stuff. It really snowed. The character I play is fighting for this location and is a family man. He doesn’t want to be away from his family, but he wants to give it a shot to get this property, and he’s in the midst of the battle.”
Woods has also wrapped work on Asteroid, a potential Netflix movie which he describes as his first doomsday film.
“The director is Dylan Avery, and it was an amazing experience,” he says of Asteroid, which filmed in upstate New York.
Woods, who lives in Newburgh Heights, also cohosts a podcast that’ll launch next month and has been busy starring in commercials for Chevy and Pepsi, one of which found him working with former Detroit Lions star Barry Sanders.
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