Willis Kwakye has attended the same school since 2021. He’s 13 now, an eighth grader, a veteran, someone who knows his way around the classrooms and the cafeteria. And sometimes, when he’s in his uniform with a math worksheet in front of him, “I can even think it’s real school for a little bit,” he said.
His classmate Arianna White, also 13, knew just what he meant. “It feels a lot like school, except we’re just filming and there’s a lot of cuts,” she said.
Kwakye and White were speaking, via video call, from a classroom on the set of “Abbott Elementary.” (They were in one of the real classrooms, where child actors complete their mandated three hours of instruction per work day.) The Emmy-winning ABC sitcom mockumentary has recently matriculated for a third season and already been renewed for a fourth. Set in a fictional K-8 school in Philadelphia — though actually filmed in Los Angeles — it requires the presence of about 150 school-age children each season.
In any given episode, those kids can be seen raising their hands in class, scurrying past each other in the hallways, giggling at their teachers’ antics. But “Abbott Elementary” diverges from most scripted series involving children in two significant ways: The show uses its child actors sparingly, giving them a handful of lines per episode and only requiring their presence one or two days each week. And for the most part, it lets them be kids.
“Having kids just be themselves actually looks really good in our world,” Quinta Brunson, the series creator and star, said in a recent phone interview.
Years ago, when Brunson was conceiving the show, she had already decided that it would center on the teachers, not the students. “When kids are carrying a show, that’s a lot of work,” she said. “And it’s not the most natural work for kids to do.”
But the show still needed child actors. (A school without them would be … strange.) The casting director, Wendy O’Brien, was tasked with finding children who were not too practiced, not too fidgety, who could realistically represent classrooms full of bright, curious public school students.
“We just try to look for real kids that you would see in a real elementary school,” she said. “What we often say to parents is, ‘Don’t coach them. Just let them be.’”
Still, Brunson had worried about how these real children would behave. The show is committed to casting children whose ages align with their characters. So the actors in the kindergarten classrooms are actually 5-year-olds, and most 5-year-olds struggle with sitting still from take to take.
“What was daunting was the idea that, oh my goodness, maybe they won’t act exactly right,” Brunson said. “But I’ll tell you what, you can get that from adults.”
What she discovered was that letting children act like themselves, right or wrong, helped make the show feel textured, grounded. Their impromptu reactions — yawning, stretching, making faces — nudge scenes toward greater realism. And the cameras are there to capture it all, as quickly as possible, so that the children can return to their mandatory schooling or simply take a break.
“Everything they’re doing, we’re getting,” said Randall Einhorn, an executive producer and director. “The kids make us be quick and efficient because we know they’re going to get bored, and rightly so.”
There are always many child actors on set together and they’re encouraged to talk to one another, help one another, form friendships. Often classroom scenes are blocked so that children aren’t needed for more than an establishing shot, and those classrooms are designed to resemble real classrooms as closely as possible.
“When we were filming the first season, a lot of them didn’t understand that I wasn’t a teacher, because everything felt so organic,” Brunson said.
The writers aim for age-appropriate dialogue and limit the amount of it to make memorization easier. Directors will often bring children behind the camera or over to the monitors to help them understand what a scene requires. And crucially, the children also have their own catering, heavy on the chicken tenders.
“It’s very good,” Justin Tan, a writer and director on the show, said. “Sometimes I want to dig in to that.” Tan also noted that the show never makes a child the butt of any joke. “I don’t want to be laughing at a kid,” he said.
Tyler James Williams, a star of the show, was a child actor in “Sesame Street” and “Everybody Hates Chris,” and he often found the experience stressful. “Part of being a child actor comes with a certain amount of trauma,” he said. “It just does. It’s a child, working an adult’s job.”
He was determined that “Abbott Elementary” would be different. He has encouraged the producers to make time on set feel less like a job and more like an after-school activity, something that a child might do just for the fun of it. He also advocated for coaches who could communicate a director’s desires to the children. He believes that these efforts are working; to him, the children seem relaxed, happy, curious.
“They ask questions,” he said approvingly. “I don’t want kids here who aren’t interested in this.”
Kristin Minkler, the lead teacher at the on-set school, also sees “Abbott Elementary” as distinct from other shows. In her 19 years in the industry, this is the most difficult show she has worked on, mostly owing to its size. “I’ve never been on a project where almost every day you have anywhere from 40 to 120 kids,” she said. But it is also by far her favorite show. “They put the kids first and as a viewer, you get that sense,” she said.
What does putting the kids first mean? “They’re just expected to be kids, and they’re allowed to be kids,” she said.
Brunson hopes that other shows might follow the example of “Abbott Elementary” in caring for the social and emotional needs of their child actors. And she trusts that the children, in their time on set, are learning more than their mandated curriculum.
“I hope that the kids on this show, when they leave here and go on in other projects, they know what health should look like,” she said.
Kwakye doesn’t spend a lot of time contemplating these things, likely because it’s his first professional job and he has never experienced the alternatives. But he remembers the moment when Janelle James, who plays Abbott’s cheerfully amoral principal, comforted him after a flubbed line and how Brunson once greeted him in the hallway.
“She said, ‘Thank you for coming,’ even though she picked me,” he marveled. Mostly “Abbott Elementary” has taught him that he would like to continue to act.
“Everything’s really fun to do,” he said. “It really makes me want to do it more.”
