Jake Epstein Talks Bipolar Disorder On Degrassi: The Next Generation: “We All Wanted The Best Storylines”
Degrassi: The Next Generation was KNOWN for going there, so when I spoke with Jake Epstein about the show’s 20th anniversary on the Pop Culture Planet podcast, we had to dive deeper into the tough storylines and situations these young actors dealt with.
When asked about if he felt pressure or found any of the storylines too difficult to tackle on the show, Jake Epstein shared, “The right answer to that question is yes, but in truth at that time we were all wanting the best storylines. We were all these young ambitious actors who wanted desperately for our characters to be in trouble because that was the most challenging, the most fun episodes to shoot as horrible as it is to say because, of course, it’s the most serious storylines that they dealt with, but we wanted them. We’d go into read throughs and we’d always check to see who got the freeze frame, is what we’d call that. A lot of episodes would end on like a freeze of one character was the lead of that episode. So we’d all flip to the last page and the writers started writing mock last pages of characters dying or going off to another planet.”
Epstein was particularly proud of his character Craig Manning’s bipolar storyline. “I really like that I got to represent that issue and hold it as a badge of pride,” he said.
The way they developed Craig, and eventually his bipolar storyline, was so seamless that I was curious if it had been built into the story from the start. “There was nothing about Craig being bipolar in the beginning. I was always convinced that like maybe as a young actor I was overacting a little bit and so they were like, uh, he's bipolar,” Epstein joked in our interview. “[But] in all seriousness, the producer Linda [Schuyler] took me into her office I think in the second or third season and said based on Craig's actions it would make a lot of sense that he's bipolar and that it's a genetic disorder. There's probably a good chance that his father was bipolar and that could have explained why he behaved the way that he behaved.”
While Epstein didn’t know much about bipolar disorder, he found playing Craig to be a very educational experience. “I remember Linda brought in a psychologist to talk to me about it and I got to sort of do some research and it really made a lot of sense based on who Craig was and and his actions and his sort of impulsiveness and his erratic sort of anger and kind of changes in personality. There had never really been at that time bipolar disorder portrayed in a teenager on television so it was a really cool experience as an actor. Afterwards I got a lot of letters from a lot of kids dealing with something like that or something similar and really liked being represented like that. I feel like the writing was pretty good. It showed the consequences of it. It showed this teenager. He didn't know what was going on, fighting wanting to take medication, which I think is a lot of truth.”
Of course, there were a ton of ups and downs for every character on Degrassi — to the point that even Epstein realized how unrealistic that might be. “I was really fortunate that they did throw a lot of really challenging storylines my way. Sometimes maybe not to the most realistic degree the number of unfortunate things that happened to Craig,” he said. “But that’s why I loved acting, to get to jump in with both feet and really embrace something [and] learn about something new.”
Jake Epstein opens up even more about Degrassi and his experience on the iconic teen franchise in our episode of the Pop Culture Planet podcast, above.
