XAVIER SMALLS: GROUNDED IN PURPOSE

After three seasons of Beauty in Black, Xavier Smalls is stepping beyond Angel, and deeper into his purpose as an actor, filmmaker and storyteller. There is a phrase Xavier Smalls remembers from acting school: “It’s not in your bones.” It was the kind of critique that could stop a young actor in his tracks. A good idea wasn’t enough. Technique wasn’t enough. For something to truly connect, it had to come from somewhere deeper, somewhere honest.

By Angel Neal | Disrupshion Magazine

Photography by Jorden Keith

Years later, that lesson has become something of a creative compass for Smalls. Whether he is standing in front of the camera as Angel in Tyler Perry’s Beauty in Black, writing a deeply personal short film about identity and belonging, or developing his next project from behind the camera, Smalls is increasingly interested in work that reaches beneath the surface. The story, he believes, has to be in your bones. And perhaps that is fitting for an actor whose own story began almost accidentally. Before studying theater, before moving to New York to train at the William Esper Studio, and long before millions of viewers would come to know him through Netflix, Smalls was a biology major at Sacramento State. It did not last. He moved into business with thoughts of eventually pursuing real estate, but an introductory theater class, and the promise of some much needed extra credit, changed the trajectory of his life. Smalls volunteered to perform in a student directed 10-minute play. The audience was tiny. His nerves were enormous. “I was terrified,” he remembers. “I was so scared, but it gave me this adrenaline rush, this high that I had never really experienced before, and it was addicting.” He made theater his minor. Soon after, it became his major.

“I was like, you know what, this is what I really want to do,” he says. “I’m the one paying for my own college… I felt like if I gave it my all, I could do this.” So he did.

Looking back now, Smalls laughs at what the younger Xavier would think of everything that followed. “What? You on Netflix, bro? That’s crazy,” he says, imagining the conversation. “He would be stoked. He would be hyped.” But the journey between Sacramento and Netflix required something beyond ambition. At New York’s William Esper Studio, Smalls found the foundation that would ultimately reshape his understanding of acting. Sacramento State had helped him become comfortable performing, but Esper taught him how to become present. “It’s everything. It’s literally everything,” he says of his training.

There, acting became less about Xavier Smalls and more about the person standing across from him. “Getting your attention off of yourself and putting your attention on your scene partner, making your scene partner more important than yourself,” he explains. “If you’re focusing on yourself or you’re focusing on your lines, it doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t look real.”

Instead, he learned to listen. To respond. To become, as he describes it, “moldable clay.” That training would prove invaluable when Smalls entered the fast moving world of Tyler Perry Studios.

For audiences of Beauty in Black, Xavier Smalls is Angel: unpredictable, complicated, emotionally vulnerable and, at times, frustratingly desperate for acceptance. But after three seasons inside the character, Smalls has developed a different relationship with the man audiences see onscreen. The biggest change has been confidence, not necessarily Angel’s, but Xavier’s. Season one arrived not long after Smalls filmed Madea’s Destination Wedding. Suddenly, he was staring at a 16-episode production schedule, appearing throughout the series and working within Tyler Perry’s famously rapid production style.

“You get like one to two takes max,” Smalls says. “Most shows, they shoot out of order, so you have to carry the weight of circumstances from previous scenes. You have to know where you are.” Early in the first season, Perry challenged him to dig deeper during a scene. Smalls took it personally at first.

“I remember I just got super down on myself,” he recalls. Then came the internal correction: “No, he believes in you, Xavier. You need to step it up.”

During that first season, Smalls became intensely focused before scenes. Headphones went in. Conversations stopped. He emotionally prepared himself for whatever Angel needed to carry into the next moment. By season three, something had shifted. Smalls understood the rhythm. He no longer needed to disappear from the entire world around him to find Angel. He could step away when necessary, prepare, rehearse and enter the scene without carrying that tension throughout the entire day. He had learned to trust his process. Still, one thing apparently has not changed. “Angel still Angel,” Smalls says with a laugh. “Angel is still wild. Angel is still biting.” What makes the role particularly interesting is how different Angel can be from the man playing him.

Smalls describes Angel as uncertain, emotionally fragile and possessed of what he jokingly calls a “pick me mentality.” Those qualities are foreign to him.

“I’m the furthest person from pick me,” he says. “I’m the type of person that’s like, ‘Oh, if you don’t want to pick me? Okay, watch this. Now I’m gonna go show you why you messed up not picking me.’”

That distance gives Smalls room to explore. In season one, audiences primarily saw Angel alongside Kimmie, revealing an almost brother and sister loyalty between the two. Season two exposed a different side, money, selfishness and behavior that complicated the audience’s understanding of him. By season three, Smalls sees those versions colliding.

“You get to see the repercussions of Angel’s actions while still seeing certain elements from season one,” he explains. And like the audience, Smalls does not always know where Angel is going next. “You never know what Tyler’s gonna write,” he says. “Every time I read it, I’m just as shocked as a lot of audience members are when they watch it. I’m like, ‘Wait, what?’ And then I turn to the next page.” Working inside the Tyler Perry Studios ecosystem has also given Smalls a front-row seat to the discipline required to operate at an enormous creative scale. He has watched Perry move between what Smalls calls different “zones.” When Perry is directing, there is complete focus. “He’s lasered in,” Smalls says. Outside of that directing mode, Smalls describes him as attentive, funny, kind and intensely present. He has also had opportunities to hear Perry discuss his writing process and the periods of quiet he uses to allow new ideas to develop.

For Smalls, the lesson has been bigger than simply observing how a successful filmmaker operates. It is about learning when to focus, when to create, when to listen and how seriously each part of the process must be taken. Those lessons matter even more now because Smalls is no longer content to exist solely in front of the camera.

To understand the filmmaker Xavier Smalls is becoming, you first have to understand the questions he has spent years asking himself. Who am I? Where do I belong? And what happens when the version of yourself that the world sees changes depending on which world you happen to be standing in? Those questions became the heartbeat of his short film Double Stuff, an autobiographical exploration of his experience growing up multiracial.

“It was like gnawing at me, the idea,” he says. “You don’t really get to see that side of things when it comes to particularly being Black and white, just sort of that feeling of belonging, but you don’t really belong.”

Growing up in Sacramento, one of the country’s most diverse cities, Smalls became fluent in moving between different spaces. In predominantly Black environments, one side of his personality emerged naturally. In predominantly white environments, another could appear just as instinctively. “That sort of code-switching element, two different identities, but like, where’s my own true identity?” he says. Making Double Stuff forced him to revisit those questions from the perspective of an adult who now sees himself differently. “I know who I am now,” he says. Looking through old videos recently with his wife, Smalls found footage of himself at 18 and 19 years old. Hearing the way he spoke a decade earlier was almost surreal. It was evidence of evolution. Evidence of the long process of becoming comfortable with oneself. For Smalls, that evolution is inseparable from faith. Ask Xavier Smalls what sits at the center of his life and there is little hesitation. “My faith is everything.” His relationship with Christianity shapes how he views career, ambition and even success itself. “The world’s success and God’s success are two different things,” he says. “The world’s success has a lot to do with status, money, achievements, fame, what you’ve done. And God’s success is like, okay, who are you? Are you dying to yourself? Are you denying yourself? Are you a servant? Are you kind? Are you loving?”

At the time of our conversation, Smalls was on his fourth reading of the Bible, finding new meaning in passages he had already encountered multiple times. The difference, he says, is where you are when you return to them.

“You just get different perspectives, different revelations,” he says. “God talks to you in different ways depending on where you’re at in your life.” It has given him a framework for navigating an industry often defined by the next role, the next headline, the next level of visibility.

Smalls still has ambitions. He still has things he wants to accomplish. But he is learning not to make them the foundation of who he is. And that shift is becoming increasingly visible in the stories he wants to tell. Directing was not part of Xavier Smalls’ original plan. In fact, it only entered the picture relatively recently. Smalls recalls having an unusually vivid dream in which he felt God was telling him to become a director. Initially, he wondered whether that meant abandoning acting altogether. Instead, he came to understand it as an expansion. “The more I explore directing, writing and just taking matters into my own hands, the more obsessed I am with storytelling as a whole,” he says.There was also a practical frustration fueling the transition. As an actor, Smalls was tired of waiting for someone else to decide when he was allowed to work. “I wanted to act way more than the opportunities I’m getting,” he says. “I just need to be acting. I need to do storytelling.”

Creating his own work gave him that freedom. Then something unexpected happened. He fell in love with directing. What began as a way to create more opportunities for himself became another artistic language entirely, the chance to see a story from conception through execution and watch all of its moving parts become one world. His next major project may be the clearest expression yet of that evolution. Smalls describes his developing project Symmetry as a modern retelling of the biblical story of Cain and Abel.

At its center are two brothers. One dreams desperately of becoming a male model but seemingly lacks the physical qualities the industry expects. The younger brother, meanwhile, is a charismatic college football player who appears to possess everything effortlessly. Then they walk into the same modeling agency. The younger brother gets signed. The older brother does not. What follows is a descent into envy, jealousy, comparison and the dangerous lengths someone might travel in pursuit of an identity they believe should have been theirs. For Smalls, the project combines several worlds he knows intimately: faith, identity and modeling, an industry he worked in for several years before his acting career took hold.

“It’s been a passion project of mine for almost a year now,” he says. With actors, a cinematographer and producing collaborators already coming together around the project, Smalls says financing remains a critical piece in moving the production forward.

He believes deeply in what the story can become.“If done right,” he says, “it’ll shake up the industry. I don’t doubt that.” The confidence is striking, but so is the foundation underneath it. Because Symmetry is not simply an idea he believes could make a compelling movie. It is personal. And Xavier Smalls has learned the difference. Double Stuff taught Smalls something about the filmmaker he wants to become. A story cannot simply be clever. “It has to be connected to your heart,” he says. “It can’t just be a good idea.” He remembers his acting teacher, Suzanne, challenging him whenever his choices felt intellectually interesting but emotionally hollow. “She would say, ‘It’s not in your bones.’” That phrase stayed. Today, Smalls applies the same philosophy to filmmaking. His experiences with race and belonging informed Double Stuff. His Christian faith, former modeling career and observations about beauty, comparison and identity are woven into Symmetry.

“The story has to come from your heart,” he says. “How you mold it is with your head.”

It also explains why identity continues to fascinate him as both an actor and filmmaker. “I feel like my bread and butter, particularly as an actor, is characters who struggle with identity,” he says. Who am I? What is my purpose? What happens when I don't know the answer? They are cinematic questions, certainly. But they are also profoundly human ones. And Xavier Smalls understands that because he has lived some version of them himself.

The young man who entered Sacramento State thinking about biology, then business, could not have predicted this version of his life. He could not have known that an extra-credit theater performance would eventually lead to New York, rigorous actor training, Tyler Perry Studios, Netflix, Beauty in Black, marriage, filmmaking and an entirely new chapter behind the camera.

But maybe the through line was there all along. Three seasons into playing Angel, Xavier Smalls is increasingly interested in showing audiences Xavier. Not simply the actor. Not simply the Netflix face. Not simply the character audiences think they know. But the artist underneath it all, a man thinking seriously about faith, purpose, identity and the responsibility that comes with telling stories. Angel may still be wild. But Xavier Smalls is becoming increasingly grounded in exactly who he is. And whatever comes next, he knows one thing: It has to be in his bones.