As an educator himself, it isn’t a shock to learn that when Flint native Kenn Hopkins Jr. starts talking about his background, he can immediately point to a number of influential teachers who helped shape his passions and career pursuits over the years.
Hopkins, a professional actor who is currently on stage as Slow Drag in the Flint Repertory Theatre’s production of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom by August Wilson, is also a middle school English teacher. A big part of his mission in the classroom is showing students that they can have practical careers, but also still chase big dreams.
“I teach sixth through eighth grade,” Hopkins said. “I love to teach, which is also theatre in itself. It’s still a performance. I also teach afterschool theatre and really enjoy teaching and directing these days. I just want to tell people out there and show them there’s so many ways to make a living. Commercial work, voiceover work, so money shouldn’t get in the way of it. The most depressing thing about the (acting) business is watching people go corporate and quit because money is an issue. I’ve just seen golden talent kind of fade away because of that and I want people to know they don’t have to.”
Hopkins says he and his family “traveled around a little bit” in his Flint history, living on every side of town at different times – “We lived on the eastside for a second, lived in Beecher for a while, lived on the northside, Brownell Boulevard, Begole Street, Epsilon Trail,” he said. “I went to McKinley, Northern, Southwestern, and graduated from Mott Middle College.”
Among those stops, Hopkins had several chances to get introduced to theatre, beginning when he was in sixth grade in a Flint Youth Theatre program at Bower Theatre.
“I was in this summer program, it was supposed to be for middle school, and I got snuck into it when I was in sixth grade,” Hopkins said. “I remember we did a theatre project where we built our own costumes, we worked on a script. It was at Bower Theatre. We did this play about clocks, and all the lines were just tick-tock. There was grandfather clock, wall clock, and I was the stopwatch. And that was my first role, and I still remember some of the memories vividly, man. I just loved the play. I loved being on stage, and loved the attention from the audience.”
He also had dreams of being a scientist when he was younger, and he said he was steered away from theatre toward more practical goals at times. But several teachers in school and later in college introduced him to bits and pieces of the artform that kept his interest in it alive. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and the character he’s playing now were even on his radar because of two teachers he had at Mott Middle College, Mr. McHugh and Ms. Milne, who taught the show to students as part of a history class. The play is one of 10 plays in Wilson’s American Century Cycle, with each focused on a different element of the Black experience within each decade of the 20th century. Ma Rainey is the third play in the series, and is set in a Chicago recording studio in 1927. His teachers had him read Slow Drag’s parts in that lesson.
“I remember reading for the scene then, so playing Slow Drag now is amazing,” Hopkins said. “There was so much I didn’t catch at the time, of course, because youth is wasted on the young, but I’m seeing it now and I understand why my teachers were so passionate about the story.”
Once he got to college, it was once again teachers who re-introduced Hopkins to theatre. He started out at Eastern Michigan University hoping to play football, but ended up transferring to University of Michigan-Flint when he stopped that pursuit. He wasn’t initially majoring in theatre there, but he learned that he could take theatre as an elective class and audition for shows and potentially receive scholarship money. Hopkins had been taught in high school by the sister of UM-Flint faculty member Julie Carr, and her class in college helped him deepen his appreciation.
“We read Shakespeare and in Hamlet I played Claudius, the father, and we were just reading it in class,” Hopkins said. “It was an elective class, so some kids took it seriously and some didn’t, and it was just kind of a moment for them to decompress. But I really just got into it, and she (Carr) felt I was good enough to audition and get some scholarship money. So that’s how I ended up in the BFA (bachelor of fine arts) program on a scholarship at UM-Flint. And I got cast pretty often and was just really excelled, and it’s kinda been up from there.”
He credits UM-Flint faculty members like Janet Haley, Bill Irwin, Lauren Friesen, and Carolyn Gillespie for laying a solid foundation for him in that program. After graduating from UM-Flint, Hopkins moved on to the University of Houston, where he studied theatre and film while completing their master of fine arts (MFA) program.
“That was a tough program, it was like the Marines for performers, and that really built a lot of character for me and changed who I was as a worker,” he said.
As with all of his stops, he credits several University of Houston teachers with helping him elevate as an artist. Those influential folks include Sara Becker, Jack Young, Adam Noble, and Robert Shimko, among others. Along with what he learned in the curriculum there, Hopkins said it was also eye-opening to see so many faculty members who were also working artists making a living doing something they are passionate about.
“They just really took me and just gave me a nice thorough knowledge of theatre where I could adopt it as a lifestyle,” Hopkins said. “A lot of times, people get into the arts and don’t feel like they can make a decent living or they feel like they have to be like A-list famous in order for this to mean something. It’s just been everything to me to see there are a lot of paths to do this.”
In addition to teaching, Hopkins has also appeared in productions of Macbeth, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Julius Caesar, Pride and Prejudice, A Christmas Carol at American Shakespeare Center in Virginia, Akeelah and The Bee at Flint Youth Theatre, and The Merchant of Venice at Houston Shakespeare Festival. He has also appeared on several episodes of the TV show Stop the Threat.
He regularly posts content on his Instagram page, Coffee With Kinn, where he tries to share and capture stories of everyday people and the beauty of life.
“We get so caught up with celebrities that we don’t really see people next to us, and I just wanted to bring more attention to just the average person,” he said. “I like to interview my friends like they’re celebrities and just cover current issues and come up with solutions to the problem as opposed to just exploiting the problems all the time and also just promote other people. Coffee With Kinn, that’s like coffee with family, you know, just trying to keep things sincere and organic in this land of technology and AI.”
Hopkins’ own family has also been particularly influential on his life and career.
“I grew up with seven of us all together, me and my siblings, in my household,” Hopkins said. “Shout out to my parents for enduring that. And when it comes to entertainment, we really just had a lot of fun in the house. We didn’t grow up with a lot of money, so a lot of our time and entertainment was just in the house or sometimes outside with our friends, but we really entertained each other a lot. I tell my siblings all the time, ‘Hey, you guys could perform too.’ I’m just the only sibling that decided to do this for a living, but I swear to you, there are some actors in my house who could probably blow me out of the water. They just don’t know it yet. I’m trying to convince them.”
Hopkins has deep love for Flint, and he’s proud to help bring such a powerful show to the stage at Flint Rep (tickets are available online).
“The backdrop (of Wilson’s plays) was never necessarily about just being Black, but it was like, ‘Hey, these people happen to be Black, and this is what’s going on politically behind the scenes,’” Hopkins said. “The focal point was still based on very universal messages of love and family. But I just love the way you can still find yourself in the complete American Black experience through all the politics in the background. August has this profound way of just putting this all into like 100 pages, with it still mainly about the love between these characters. And the cast is amazing. It’s been so easy to work with the director, Rico (Bruce Wade), and the quartet, the band members, Nathan (Barlow), Henrí (Franklin), and Richard (Harris). We feel like a real band now, you know? It’s been a great experience. I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this.”
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