By his own account, Jefferson Russell was a shy guy at Baltimore City College. He thought other students who performed in plays were cool; he admired them. But he could not imagine himself on stage.

That was then, this is now.

Russell, a middle-aged accomplished actor with a long list of stage credits, will take a lead role in the Chesapeake Shakespeare Co.’s production of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” part of the Baltimore theater community’s three-year celebration of August Wilson’s 10 plays about 20th-century Black life.

Russell will play Seth, owner of the boarding house, circa 1910, where the story unfolds. It’s his first role with Chesapeake Shakespeare but one of many he’s had in his hometown. Russell has been a member of Everyman Theatre’s talented resident company since 2019. He’s traveled far and wide to play all kinds of roles, some Shakespearean, over a professional career stretching back 32 years.

Not bad for a shy guy.

And even more interesting given his first career choice — Baltimore police officer.

Jefferson Russell’s life provides a good lesson for any young man or woman — in high school or just out, in college or just out — who might be quietly fretting the road ahead. Some have decided on a career already, but most are still uncertain, and that’s quite all right. Jefferson Russell will tell you that.

His life’s journey affirms that the choices you make at 18 or 22 do not lock you into a career. You could be on a completely different path at 30 or 40 or 50.

And if you think you’re too shy — or too this or too that — you might prove yourself wrong, in a good way.

The son of William and Alice Russell, a doctor and nurse, Jefferson Russell got a taste of acting when he was a boy growing up in Baltimore. His mother knew her youngest child was on the shy side, so she enrolled him in a couple of summer theater programs for kids.

But by the time Russell was a senior at City, he had decided on a career in law enforcement. He studied sociology and criminal justice at Hampton University in Virginia. He graduated in the mid-1980s, around the time Kurt Schmoke became the first Black man elected mayor of Baltimore. That got Russell interested in serving his hometown.

“I decided to come back home to be a police officer because it really felt like a shift, a big shift,” he says. “And I wanted to be a part of it. …[Becoming an officer] was, truly, to work for my people, my neighborhood and my city. I wasn’t interested in being a police officer any place else.”

His first stop was Greenmount Avenue and Eager Street, his post as a new officer in the tough Eastern District, in the midst of the war on drugs. He spent four years in uniform before deciding to take another path.

Two things had bothered him — the increasing number of young boys getting in trouble for acts of violence and the behavior of fellow officers. “You see certain things,” he says. “You’re exposed to certain things, and I didn’t need to be a part of it.”

He thought he could be more effective counseling kids instead of arresting them. “I didn’t get the job to knock heads,” he says.

So he took a state position as a juvenile probation officer, checking up on minors in Prince George’s County who were under court supervision.

Russell found that work rewarding, but, as it turns out, the seed for a career in acting had been planted several years earlier, back at Hampton University.

In his freshman year, Russell was homesick and wanted to transfer to another school. His mother would have none of that and, as she had done similarly when he was a boy, she suggested her son “go to the theater department and see what’s going on.”

And that’s exactly what he did. Russell got busy with student productions. During an exciting and successful trip to Chicago for a drama competition with other college students, the acting seed took root.

“My world just opened up,” he says.

Still, he came back to Baltimore, entered the police academy and went to the Eastern District. During his years as a police officer and his time in juvenile justice, acting remained a side gig, not a career.

Which gets us to the other lesson from the life of Jefferson Russell, this one for the adults in the room: If you see something in a young man or woman, some skill or talent that they do not see themselves — because they lack confidence, because they’re shy, because they’re distracted — you have a duty to point it out. You have an adult responsibility to be encouraging.

“I have benefited from people seeing things in me that I was not ready to recognize,” Russell says.

His parents, especially his mother, supported him in his endeavors. And at Arena Players in Baltimore, Amini Courts and Donald Owens, the artistic directors, encouraged Russell to be an actor. “Those two people are my mentors, and they are people who see something in you that you don’t see in yourself,” he says.

What they saw was what has emerged — a skilled actor with a robust persona and arresting stage presence. Not bad for a shy guy.