The entrance to Prayer Mountain is steep and winding. Past the gates to this 100-acre hiking oasis in Mountain Creek, a rustic boardwalk is covered in scribbles of scripture, and a metal sculpture has a circle with three crosses inside.
This is where D-FW native and Netflix breakout star Michael Cooper Jr. comes to recharge.
“I actually bring a lot of scripts here to start building characters,” the 23-year-old actor says one recent morning at Prayer Mountain the spot, which he discovered through an ex-girlfriend. “It’s like a place of solitude and isolation away from chaos.”
He’s seated on a bench in an opening sparsely populated by trees, wearing all black in the 90-degree heat. Nearby, several Spanish speakers take turns praying over one another.
The chaos he alludes to at this moment may be the whiplash sensation of being relatively unknown a week prior to now receiving a surge of emails and Instagram DMs in response to his role in the hit Netflix series Forever, which premiered on May 8.
Created by Mara Brock Akil, Forever loosely adapts Judy Blume’s YA namesake novel from 1975.
The jittery excitement of falling in love and the fumbling novelty around physical intimacy remain the same, but the story takes place in 2018 Los Angeles with the leads being two Black teenagers, Justin (Cooper) and Keisha (Lovie Simone).
Keisha is a charismatic but emotionally guarded track star, while Justin is a basketball player with ADHD who speaks from the heart.
“When I first read the script, I was petrified,” Cooper says. “I was like, ‘Oh my boys are gonna crucify me for this one because he’s such an emotional guy — a vulnerable guy.”
He recalls asking Akil, the show’s creator, if his character really had to cry at times and being unsure if audiences would like Justin, whom he described as “not suave.”
In preparation for the role, Cooper visited a private school in Atlanta where he spent time with young Black male students.
“I just remember them being so awkward,” he says. “They’re developing who they are and they’re just trying to figure it out. I thought it was beautiful.”
To him, Forever appeals to those seeking the light amid heavy times.
To be clear, the show does wade into serious territory.
In a scene halfway through the eight-episode season, Justin is driving home when he sees the flashing blue and red lights of a police car behind him. He freezes for a second before the car passes.
The brief moment surfaces memories for Cooper of his parents instructing him on how to behave during a traffic stop. “Make sure you’re not looking like you’re searching or reaching for any weapon,” he recalls them saying.
Or the memory of the time he says he and his friends were racially profiled in a neighborhood moms Facebook page. Someone posted a message along the lines of, “Be careful, three Black boys in a car.” Cooper’s mother spotted the post online.
“The world gets amnesia,” he says. “But it’s very much still happening.”
Justin and Keisha’s on-again, off-again romance is at the center of Forever. To Cooper, though, the show’s focus is broader, opening dialogue about how love can be found within others and ourselves.
Faith as a guiding force
At the age of 8 or 9, Cooper portrayed Martin Luther King Jr. in a play for church. He delivered the late civil rights activist’s 1963 speech “I Have a Dream” drenched in toilet water.
“I was dressed up in a suit and I remember going to use the restroom right before the play started. I was fixing my tie and my tie got caught in the toilet,” he says. “I was calling my mom panicking … I don’t know how we did it, but we did.”
The bathroom ordeal aside, Cooper’s early ventures into theater gave him a taste for acting.
“When you find the thing that you’re meant to be doing on this planet, it just connects with you internally,” he says, snapping his fingers. “That’s what was happening at that age. I just didn’t know necessarily how to convey it.”
Coming from a family that was not “necessarily artistic” — his mother is a nurse and his father works in pharmaceutical sales — the idea of being an actor was foreign, “insane” even.
“My parents were very much like — lawyer, doctor, everything but an artist, which I understand,” he says. “They want me to be stable.”
For a while, he was indeed on the path to being a lawyer. He was in student council in high school, a favorite pastime of aspiring attorney types.
But, right before college, he decided upon acting, describing the pivot as putting himself first over pleasing others.
In pursuit of his dream, he graduated high school early and moved to Atlanta at the beginning of 2020, which was a big deal, he says, missing prom and all, although the end-of-the-year rite of passage would be nixed by the pandemic.
Before the lockdown sent him back to Texas, he got an agent and cut his teeth auditioning. Having entered the industry at a time of massive uncertainty, Cooper points to his faith as the unseen force guiding him.
God has made a way for him, he says. “Everything he’s said in prayer has come true.”
No social media, no problems
For his high school’s yearbook, Cooper was interviewed about having the least followers on Instagram. In fact, he had none, since he didn’t have an account.
He’s on Instagram these days, but his aversion to social media lingers. He uses an iPhone for its convenient technological advances (e.g. Google Maps). But when he returns to the comfort of home, he’ll turn it off and use his flip phone instead.
“Online is so fickle, it’s not real,” he says. “You can get a little lost.”
He’s glad people are connecting with the show — among its fans is actress Keke Palmer, who FaceTimed him to say he had “killed” the part. (“She’s so cool, dude,” Cooper says.)
But the attention and the online videos (yes, he’s been sent the slo-mo, thirst trap clips of Justin on his non-Y2K phone) can be overwhelming, he says.
“If they’re saying horrible things, that would hurt, but they are liking the thing that we did, which is even weirder, I think?”
A Wikipedia page was recently created for Cooper — a stamp of his newfound recognition. He was unaware he had one and has no plans to read it.
“Who would have thought?” he says. “I’m just,” he pauses, “a boy from Texas.”
As the interview wraps up, an employee for Mountain Creek Community Church on Prayer Mountain introduces Cooper to its pastor, Robert Summers.
They shake hands and Summers asks, “So you’re an aspiring actor?”
Cooper smiles bashfully. Just minutes later, it was announced that Forever has been renewed for a second season.
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