After more than twenty years on screen, Jesse Lewis IV steps into Miss Stu — the neighborhood matriarch at the heart of Tyler Perry Studios’ Route 187, premiering September 16 on Paramount+ with all four episodes at launch. We talked with him about building the character (“I didn’t want to play a gender, I wanted to play a human being”), about walking into that studio as the first transgender character to come out of it other than Perry’s own, and about the twenty years he spent fighting scripts just to get his characters a last name, a job and an education. There’s also a straight-talking business lesson in here: limited series live or die on week-one numbers, so if you want more stories like this getting made, the vote is your viewership.
“I didn’t want to play a gender. I wanted to play a human being.”
That’s Jesse Lewis IV, and it’s the sentence the rest of this conversation hangs on.
We caught up with Jesse for #ILoveGay Today from Tennessee, a few days out from the premiere of Route 187 — the Tyler Perry Studios limited series landing on Paramount+ on Wednesday, September 16, all four episodes at once. He plays Miss Stu, and after more than twenty years on screen, he’s calling it the role he’s been preparing for the whole time.
Not the Tyler Perry production you’re expecting
First thing Jesse wanted to clear up: this one plays differently than the usual output from that studio.
“Tyler Perry didn’t write this production. He didn’t even direct it. He produced it,” Jesse said. The series belongs to Mark E. Swinton — writer, director and executive producer. “This is his baby, his brainchild. He’s had it for over 10 years.”
It’s a four-part crime drama set in South Winslow, following a community demanding answers after a tragic event on a local bus route. And at the center of Jesse’s piece of it is Miss Stu — the neighborhood matriarch who takes in the people nobody else will.
“She’s kind of the safe place when people don’t have anywhere else to go,” he said. “She literally shelters the homeless. It may be a woman who’s going through domestic violence. There may be a guy running from the police has to hide in her basement.”
Part protector, part gatekeeper, part mystery. Refuge, but with rules — and, as the show puts it, a price.
The matriarch, rewritten
Jesse is direct about why the character reads as unconventional.
“Usually when you think of strong Black women characters, matriarch of a community, you may think Clair Huxtable,” he said. “This is a transgender character. So there was a level of, I guess, social education that had to go into it.”
He’s also aware of exactly whose house he’s doing it in. Tyler Perry, as Jesse put it, “has made a multi-billion dollar industry on the Black matriarch.” Walking into that studio as the first transgender character to come out of it other than Perry’s own was, in his words, a big stiletto to fill.
“I’m not scared of a challenge,” he said. “I’m an Aries, if that makes any difference to anybody watching.”
What settled him was deciding not to build the performance around gender at all.
“No matter white, Black, gay, straight, transgender, cisgender — we’re all human beings. We all have similar experiences,” he said. “So I was focused more on what her purpose was, what her wants, what her desires were, what her fears were, and less on her gender.”
It’s worth naming plainly that a cisgender man playing a transgender woman is a real and unresolved argument in our community right now, and it’s one trans performers have been making forcefully for years about the roles they don’t get offered. Jesse doesn’t dodge the responsibility side of it. In the announcement for the series, he framed it this way: “My responsibility was to honor Miss Stu with care—never reducing her to a joke or stereotype, but preserving her humanity and power.”
How well that lands is the audience’s call, starting Wednesday. But the intent behind it is stated out loud, which is more than most productions bother to do.
Twenty years of fighting for a last name
The most striking part of our conversation wasn’t about this role. It was about everything that came before it.
Jesse has been a champion for his community from the start — “because I am a Black gay man, that’s who I am.” But when he began booking work around 2005 and 2006, the parts written for men portraying women came with almost nothing attached.
“It felt like there was no development for the characters,” he said. “There was no last names. There was no indicative employment. And if it was — you’re a drag queen, crossdresser, you’re obviously a prostitute.”
So he negotiated. Not for billing or money — for personhood.
“I would fight for a last name. I would fight for a job description. I would fight for having an education. I would fight for coming from certain types of households.”
Read that list again. Every item on it is a piece of backstory that any other character on the call sheet would have been handed automatically. That’s twenty years of one actor doing unpaid script development so his characters would count as people.
There’s a grim economics footnote to it, too. The industry had a billing category for what he did: specialty talent.
“When I would book roles, I could get a higher base rate because I was playing a specialty talent — which was a man wearing women’s clothing,” he said. Better pay, thinner character. “I think there’s a story in that in itself.”
His read on where things stand now is cautiously optimistic, and he credits the people coming up behind him.
“I think the battle has gotten easier because this younger generation is so much more vocal,” he said — more expressive, with better means to say it. The characters he plays always had a story in them. The difference is that now it can make it onto the page.
Why opening week actually matters
Here’s the part worth paying attention to if you care about queer and Black storytelling getting made at all.
Jesse was completely transparent about the business behind the promotion. Route 187 is a limited series, and limited series live or die on their first numbers.
“If it does well, it can be picked up for a full season and then we can all get paid again,” he said. “And if it doesn’t, it will just live on the Paramount+ universe in that streaming platform, but it won’t ever happen. So we’re hoping that the numbers are good the first week. People support it. Turn the TVs on, talk to your friends about it.”
This is the whole representation conversation reduced to a spreadsheet, and it’s honest. Every brand, agency and media company that says it wants more authentic LGBTQ+ and Black stories on screen is, in practice, voting on that with viewership in a seven-day window. Streamers renew what performs. Nothing about that is mysterious.
He’s also refreshingly unprecious about his own stake in it. He appears in episodes three and four — and hasn’t seen them yet.
“I’m promoting on faith, because I don’t know what I look like,” he laughed. “I could be horrible. Could be the end of my career.”
The long game
Jesse’s screen credits run wide — Netflix’s Florida Man, Tyler Perry’s Sistas, TNT’s Southland, Queen America, Black Dynamite, Meet the Spartans, plus a run of television appearances going back years.
Alongside all of it, he’s enrolled full-time in Boston University’s MBA program — on the view that understanding the business is what gives an acting career a second half. Creating your own opportunity, knowing what your work is worth, building something that outlasts the next audition.
For an actor who spent two decades arguing that his characters deserved a job description, going and getting the credential himself is a fairly pointed move.
Watch it
Route 187 premieres Wednesday, September 16 on Paramount+, with all four episodes available at launch. Watch the trailer here.
Our full conversation with Jesse is up now on the Pink Media / #ILoveGay YouTube channel. Watch it here.
Follow Jesse at @JesseLegendary on Instagram, @jessewiththegudhair on TikTok, @jesselewisactor on YouTube, and on IMDb.
Set a reminder for Wednesday. This is one of those weeks where watching something is the whole point.
