The 2002 Sam Jones interview

Absolutely no problem, Jones says with typical certitude. The antidote will always be at hand: family. Throughout lunch, Jones continually returns to the sustaining power of the Jones clan, and of his father in particular. "They always treat me the same; I'm still the same kid. All I gotta do is put one phone call home to one of my cousins or something and just hear what they're going through. It reminds me . . . where I'm from and what I have to achieve."

Jones's story begins in front of the television set, during his family's years in Roxbury (before they moved to their current Mattapan home). Watching a show with her oldest son, Dorlene Jones, an elementary-school art teacher, asked him, "Do you want to be on TV"?

She posed the question with the same whimsical air that a parent might ask, "Do you want to be a fireman when you grow up?" But little Sam said yes, and so she got to work. "She started digging right away," he says, "looking in the Yellow Pages. How do you get to go on TV? She found a talent agency and got me involved in that. That right there changed my life."

After high school, with only a few commercials on his resume, Jones decided to move in with a friend in Los Angeles and pursue an acting career. "Things didn't go too well," he says. "I wasn't really interested in acting. I was more interested in hanging out all day without parents around." Jones's father reached out and touched his son with a long-distance warning call: "He said, `If you think you can make it, I'll pay your first few months' rent. After that, I'm not going to be able to afford it.' So my dad would call me every morning, wake me up and get me going."

Mobilized, Jones plastered the town with his photo portfolio until an agency found him his first-ever acting gig, on "NYPD Blue." And there he was, from Boston to Hollywood, face to face with Dennis Franz and Rick Schroder, actors he'd seen on TV as a kid. Small roles on "Judging Amy" and "CSI" quickly followed, and finally, a starring role - in an as-yet unreleased movie called "Snipes," co-starring Dean Winters from "Oz" and rapper Nelly. At last, he thought, no more ramen-noodle sandwiches and 29-cent McDonald's specials.

"But after that I doubted myself," he says. "I've had all this success and I'm starring in a movie, but what could be next, because there's not a lot of young black leading actors in Hollywood?" Relief came in the form of a movie called "ZigZag," in which he was cast in the lead as an autistic 15-year-old. He says the other actors, including Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo, served as older brothers, hazing him affectionately on the set. "OK, Sam, two movies in a row, two for two, it's downhill from here," they'd say. "You're going to be, like, third dental assistant on the next movie." "ZigZag" awaits a distributor.

And then came "Smallville," a drama that imagines Clark Kent/Superman as an angsty teen. Jones says the WB offer was heaven-sent, since he'd just been telling his father he wanted to do an hourlong TV series.

"I told him I didn't want to do a half-hour comedy, and I didn't want to be in an all-black cast. Because I really want to follow the career of Cuba Gooding Jr. or Denzel Washington, and I just want to be looked at as a prestigious actor. I'm very serious about my craft. Not that you can't do that on an African-American show, but it seems as though you get stereotyped there. I wanted to bust the doors fully open before I decide to take roles like that."

His part on "Smallville" actually is a door-buster: In the Superman comic strip, Jones's character, Clark Kent's pal Pete Ross, is white. "It's breaking barriers," Jones says.

Breaking more barriers won't be easy for Jones. Hollywood is the very place where ethnic and racial stereotypes are packaged and sent out to the public. He says he wants to play "parts where you don't have to be a certain ethnicity, where it's just a character." But the reality is that young black actors find limited amounts of work on TV, and when they do it's often in roles that require them to spend a scene or two behind bars.

"Don't always put us in baggy jeans and have us selling drugs," Jones says. "One day when I get older, I'll want to play a cop, or maybe a doctor. I will play a drug dealer, too, that's no problem. But I want quality work. If it's a movie by Spike Lee, and it's a street character, fine, I'll play that character and I'll try to play it as real . . . as possible. But I don't want that to be all I can play, and if I'm playing it, I want it to be quality."

Jones would also like to avoid another kind of pigeonhole: "I don't tell my age," he says when the inevitable question is asked. "Just like in life, if there was a way that you wouldn't have to tell your ethnicity. . . . You may want to play a young doctor, and they say, `What's your age?' [and you tell them], and then they say, `You're too young.' Hold on! You didn't even see me read! I'm gonna act real mature! There are so many ways of being shot down, and you want to have the widest range of age and ethnicity of what you can do."

For the record, Jones calls from Vancouver later with the magic number: 19.

By the way, Jones has done a very un-Hollywood thing and brought his father to supervise this interview. Sam Jones Jr., a fireman, says little during lunch, unwilling to borrow a single ray of his son's limelight except with an occasional smirk.

But when Sam III admits that he has been "amped" by the interview process, Sam Jr. is compelled to speak: "He's always been hyper," he says, smiling. "When he was a kid, we always had to get him involved in some type of program like swimming. He swims like a fish."

If you listen to Sam III, Sam Jr. is not just a little responsible for his son's success. "I respect my mom. . . . But when you get to a certain age, you feel young and you'll do what you want, and a woman, she can't physically reprimand you. . . . We weren't really scared of my dad because he was nice to us, but there was always that fear factor if we did something wrong.

"A lot of kids in the inner city don't have any fear factor; there's not a lot of programs there for them. It's just a bad situation growing up in the inner city, but you don't know any better, so you love it. And you just get involved in what all your friends are getting involved in. If everybody in the neighborhood is smoking weed and selling drugs, then you smoke weed and sell drugs, too.

"My message to the kids is just don't do that; there's another way. Your life can be bigger than Boston. You may have started here but you can go somewhere else."

Not that Jones is down on Boston. He loves visiting home, especially now that he's living among ever-polite Canadians. "I like to come here and get my realness back," he says.

Listening to Jones, you feel that he may actually make his dreams come true - and then some. His career so far has been a giant act of will, especially when you consider that he has never taken an acting class and that his first acting job ever was opposite an Emmy-winning actor on the set of an Emmy-winning cop drama.

Not surprisingly, he attributes his drive to his family. "I love my identity; I love my name. Sam Jones the third. My grandfather was Sam Jones Sr. and having the same name as him is an honor to me. He started our family off in the projects, the E Street projects, and then my Dad moved us to Roxbury, to Madison Park Village, and then he moved us to our house in Mattapan.

"Hopefully I'll be able to take our family to a whole new level - if all goes according to plan."