Key Facts

• Aubrey Graham was a 14-year-old with no professional acting credits when he auditioned for Degrassi: The Next Generation in Toronto in 2001.
• He was cast as Jimmy Brooks, a popular basketball player from a wealthy family, and first appeared in the Season 1 episode Family Politics.
• Co-creator Linda Schuyler recalled that Graham had the charisma, warmth and vulnerability the producers needed; he also accidentally snagged a light stand while leaving.
• Graham played Jimmy for eight years as a regular cast member and returned for a Season 8 guest appearance.
• In the 2004 two-part episode Time Stands Still, Jimmy was shot by Rick Murray and left paralyzed; the show explored the aftermath across later seasons.
• Writer James Hurst later recalled a law-firm letter demanding Jimmy walk again and Graham saying friends in rap thought the wheelchair made him soft.
• While filming, Graham built a music career as Drake, releasing mixtapes including Room for Improvement in 2006, Comeback Season in 2007 and So Far Gone in 2009.
• His final Degrassi appearance aired in Canada on January 18, 2009; So Far Gone arrived less than a month later.
• Drake later embraced the role, including a 2018 music video that reunited much of the Degrassi cast.

A nervous audition that found Jimmy Brooks

In 2001, a lanky 14-year-old named Aubrey Graham walked into an audition room in Toronto hoping to land his first acting job. Producers of Degrassi: The Next Generation had already seen hundreds of school-aged actors while searching for the young cast of their revival of a beloved Canadian teen franchise. One role was proving especially difficult to fill: Jimmy Brooks, a popular basketball player from a wealthy family. The producers needed someone with enough confidence to convincingly play one of the cool kids, but also enough warmth and vulnerability to make the character more complicated than a simple high-school archetype. As co-creator Linda Schuyler later recalled, they could not find somebody with the right combination of charisma, warmth and vulnerability.

Then Aubrey Graham sat down to read. He finished the scene and was met with silence, which seemed to terrify the inexperienced teenager. He looked around the room and asked whether he had done something wrong and whether he could try again. The producers reassured him that he had done well. The awkwardness did not end there. When Graham stood up to leave, he accidentally snagged a light stand, causing it to wobble before a production assistant grabbed it. He shook everyone's hands, thanked them repeatedly and politely backed out of the room. Four people behind the table looked at one another and agreed that they had just found their Jimmy Brooks.

Before Jimmy, there was Degrassi

By the time Graham auditioned, Degrassi was already a Canadian television institution with a history stretching back more than two decades. The franchise was created by middle school teacher Linda Schuyler and her producing partner Kit Hood. It began with a collection of standalone short television films, including Ida Makes a Movie, which premiered in 1979. Those films evolved into The Kids of Degrassi Street, but the franchise became a cultural phenomenon with Degrassi Junior High in 1987.

Unlike glossy American teen dramas, Degrassi Junior High looked like the schools its young audience actually attended. Its amateur teenage actors looked and dressed like real kids, while its characters dealt with puberty, peer pressure, teenage pregnancy, abortion and suicide with a realism that rarely slipped into exaggerated moralizing. The approach resonated with viewers in Canada and eventually aired in more than 40 countries. The franchise continued with Degrassi High from 1989 to 1991, followed by the post-graduation television film School's Out in 1992 and the non-fiction docuseries Degrassi Talks that same year. After a quiet period in the early 1990s, Schuyler and longtime writer Yan Moore began discussing a reunion special. They realized that Emma, the daughter of Christine 'Spike' Nelson, whose teenage pregnancy had been one of the original show's landmark storylines, would now be old enough to enter junior high herself. Rather than simply revisiting the past, they saw an opportunity to introduce a new generation of students while allowing earlier characters to return as adults. The idea became Degrassi: The Next Generation, which was greenlit in 2000. More than 600 school-aged children eventually auditioned for the series, including Aubrey Graham.

Casting a future superstar

Graham was raised primarily by his mother, Sandi Graham, after his parents separated when he was five. He spent parts of his childhood in Toronto's west end and later Forest Hill, attending Forest Hill Collegiate Institute before transferring to Vaughan Road Academy. His father, Dennis Graham, was a drummer who had played alongside Jerry Lee Lewis, so music was already present in Aubrey's life. But television gave him his first real opportunity in entertainment. Actor Stephen Brogren, already familiar to generations of Degrassi viewers as Archie 'Snake' Simpson, helped connect young Graham with the show's casting team. Graham had no professional acting credits, but Schuyler repeatedly recalled that there was something immediately compelling about him. She described a charisma and warmth to his face and his smile, and said the camera adored him.

More than two decades later, Drake revealed another side to the story of his famous first audition. In a 2023 voice memo shared on social media, he admitted that he had gotten high shortly before walking into the room after succumbing to peer pressure while hanging out with other kids. He explained that before the audition he went to another kid's house and, out of a desire to be accepted, got high with them. The memory stayed with him in a surprisingly existential way. He said he had occasionally wondered whether something had actually gone wrong that day and whether the extraordinary life that followed could somehow be imagined. He described the idea that he might still be high or in a coma and simply playing out an ideal life. The two recollections offer strangely complementary versions of the same life-changing afternoon. Schuyler remembers discovering a teenager with exactly the charisma, warmth and vulnerability the producers needed, while Drake remembers being an insecure kid desperate enough to fit in that he got high before the first major audition of his life.

Becoming Jimmy Brooks

Degrassi: The Next Generation premiered in October 2001, introducing audiences to a new ensemble of young students navigating adolescence at Degrassi Community School. Graham made his first appearance as Jimmy Brooks a few weeks later in the Season 1 episode Family Politics. Initially, he appeared to fit neatly into one of television's most familiar high-school archetypes: he was handsome, athletic, popular and wealthy, played basketball, dated popular yet insecure overachiever Ashley Kerwin and spent much of his time with his best friend, Spinner Mason.

Of course, this was Degrassi, where familiar archetypes rarely remained uncomplicated for long. Throughout his first three seasons, Jimmy slowly emerged as much more than the stereotypical high-school jock. Viewers saw his seemingly privileged home life complicated by frequently absent parents, watched his relationship with Ashley become increasingly messy and saw his friendship with the more impulsive Spinner repeatedly tested. Underneath the confidence of the popular basketball player was someone sensitive and creative, with growing interests in art and music as well as insecurities about the expectations other people had placed on him. That emotional complexity helped make Jimmy an important part of the show's ensemble. Unlike Spinner, whose impulsiveness frequently got him into trouble, Jimmy often became the more grounded presence in their friendship. He could be stubborn, jealous and occasionally immature, but there was an underlying decency to the character that made viewers trust him and root for him. As the series grew from a Canadian revival into an international success, Jimmy Brooks became one of its most recognizable characters.

The gunshot that changed everything

During the fourth season, Degrassi fundamentally changed Jimmy's life. To many fans, no episode remains more unforgettable than Time Stands Still, the two-part episode that aired in October 2004 and tackled school violence with a seriousness rarely seen on television aimed at young audiences. Schuyler has said she began thinking about incorporating a school-shooting storyline following the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, but it took several years before the writers felt prepared to tackle the subject. When the cast gathered for the read-through, Schuyler recalled a stillness in the room and said she felt physically sick as everyone discovered where the story was heading.

The episodes centred on Rick Murray, a troubled student who had previously physically abused his girlfriend before returning to Degrassi, where he became the target of relentless bullying and humiliation. After a cruel prank was played on him in front of the entire school, Spinner and school bully Jay Hogart manipulated Rick into believing Jimmy had been responsible, despite the fact that Jimmy had actually been one of the few students to show him kindness. Rick returned to school with a gun, confronted Jimmy in a hallway and shot him in the back before he himself was killed during a struggle with another student. The shooting permanently changed one of the show's most popular characters, and Graham himself had no idea it was coming. He recalled that he did not know about the end of Time Stands Still until the read-through. Somebody told him to mentally prepare for the script, but they did not tell him there would be a shooting at the school and that he would be the victim. As the young cast realized what was going to happen, the read-through became intensely emotional. There was shock and sadness, and the cast held hands and cried.

Jimmy survived the shooting, but the writers made the consequential decision not to give the character an easy recovery or eventually return him to the life viewers had previously known. The shooting left Jimmy paralyzed, and rather than treating his disability as the subject of a single special episode before moving on, Degrassi committed to exploring the consequences over the seasons that followed. Viewers watched Jimmy navigate rehabilitation, anger, frustration, depression, relationships and eventually a degree of acceptance as he learned to live his life in a wheelchair. His disability became part of his character without becoming the entirety of his character. Jimmy was still allowed to date, joke, paint, fall in love, fight with his friends and imagine a future for himself.

For Graham, the storyline initially raised difficult questions about what playing Jimmy would now require. He asked what he was supposed to do now and said he did not want to spend the rest of his years in a wheelchair. He wanted to be with everyone else. The storyline also forced the young actor to stretch dramatically. He explained that a lot more went into playing Jimmy after the shooting and that it gave him something to study and homework as an actor. Looking back on the uncompromising nature of the storyline, Drake credited exactly the quality that had made Degrassi distinctive from the beginning: the show was good because life is difficult and the writers were not afraid to let young viewers know that.

The wheelchair controversy

In 2021, as Degrassi: The Next Generation celebrated the 20th anniversary of its premiere, writer James Hurst made a remarkable claim about Graham's relationship with Jimmy's wheelchair. According to Hurst, the production once received a letter from a Toronto law firm stating that Graham would not return for Season 6 unless Jimmy's injury was healed and the character was allowed to walk again. Hurst recalled that the letter was from Aubrey and described it as odd. It said Aubrey Graham would not return to Degrassi Season 6 as Jimmy Brooks unless his injury was healed and he was out of the wheelchair.

Hurst said he asked Graham to come into the production office, where the actor denied knowing about the letter. Rather than dwelling on where it had come from, Hurst asked him directly how he felt about continuing to play Jimmy in a wheelchair. Graham's reported answer revealed just how conscious he had already become of the way Jimmy Brooks, and particularly the character's wheelchair, was perceived by people around him in hip-hop. According to Hurst, Graham said all his friends in the rap game called him soft because he was in a wheelchair. Hurst's response has since become legendary among Degrassi fans: he told Graham to tell his friends in the rap game that he got shot. How much harder could he get? He got shot, and he was in a wheelchair. Graham ultimately stayed on the show and Jimmy remained in his wheelchair. But Hurst's recollection is fascinating when viewed through the lens of everything that came next. The character that had given Graham his first taste of fame was apparently beginning to collide with the identity he was trying to establish in music. Jimmy Brooks had given him a career, but Graham was already wondering whether Jimmy Brooks might make it harder for people to believe in Drake.

Double life

By the mid-2000s, Graham was effectively leading two professional lives, spending his days filming Degrassi in Toronto as Jimmy Brooks while devoting his nights to writing, recording and trying to build a completely separate career as Drake. The distinction between the two identities became increasingly visible to the people around him as music evolved from a side project into a serious pursuit that consumed virtually every hour he was not working on the show. According to executive producer Stephen Stohn, Graham sometimes slept in his dressing room because he had spent the entire night making music before returning to set the following morning. He used money earned from acting to help finance his recordings and manufacture physical CDs. Rather than waiting for a record company to discover him, he began distributing the music himself as he tried to create enough local momentum to force people to pay attention.

Perhaps most revealingly, Graham seemed determined to keep those two identities separate. Even as Degrassi producers recognized his musical ambitions and looked for opportunities to incorporate them into Jimmy's storyline, Graham resisted allowing the show that had made him famous to become a vehicle for introducing Drake. Stohn recalled that Graham would play them mixtapes and that producers really tried to talk him into letting them use some of his music in the show and getting him to rap and sing. Producers eventually pushed to make music a larger part of Jimmy's storyline, but according to Stohn, Graham initially stood firm. His music side was one side of his career and the acting was another. They did manage to get him to do some rap, but it took convincing. In 2006, Drake released his first mixtape, Room for Improvement, reportedly pressing and distributing thousands of physical copies while using his own money to help fund the project. Radio stations and major labels were not suddenly clamouring to sign him, and to much of the public Aubrey Graham remained far better known as the kid from Degrassi. But he continued recording. The following year, Comeback Season arrived and began to change the trajectory. The music video for Replacement Girl, featuring Trey Songz, became the first from an unsigned Canadian rapper to appear on a U.S. music video network, giving Drake a level of exposure that suggested his ambitions might not be as improbable as they had once seemed.

The end of Jimmy Brooks

By 2008, Graham's music career was becoming increasingly difficult to contain within the life he had built on television. Jimmy graduated from Degrassi at the end of Season 7, later than many of his original classmates because his rehabilitation from the shooting had forced him to repeat a year. Graham's time as a regular cast member was coming to an end as well. He would return once more as a guest star during Season 8, appearing alongside Jimmy's longtime best friend, Spinner Mason, to bring the character's story to a close. His final appearance as Jimmy Brooks came in the Season 8 episode Lost in Love: Part 2, which aired in Canada on January 18, 2009. There was no dramatic farewell or elaborate sendoff for the future superstar. Jimmy simply moved forward with his life, while the actor who had played him for most of his adolescence prepared to do exactly the same thing.

In retrospect, the timing seems almost impossibly cinematic. Less than a month after Graham's final Degrassi episode aired in Canada, Drake released So Far Gone, the mixtape that would dramatically alter the trajectory of his career. Best I Ever Had became a massive hit, while Successful, featuring Trey Songz and Lil Wayne, helped push him further into the centre of hip-hop as Lil Wayne entered the picture. For eight years, Aubrey Graham had been recognizable to millions of television viewers as Jimmy Brooks, but within an extraordinarily short period of time, Drake began to eclipse the character who had made him famous. The transformation looks almost seamless when compressed into a career retrospective, yet Graham was leaving behind a steady television job that had shaped much of his adolescence for a music industry that had given him no guarantee that his ambitions would work. The gamble paid off spectacularly, but one part of his old identity proved considerably harder to leave behind.

Could hip-hop take Drake seriously?

Drake's acting career inevitably followed him into hip-hop, where his years playing Jimmy Brooks, and particularly his years playing him in a wheelchair, became an easy way for critics to question whether a former Canadian teen actor could possess the kind of authenticity traditionally demanded by rap. His years as Wheelchair Jimmy became an obvious reference point for anyone looking to question Drake's credibility, which makes Hurst's recollection of how Graham had worried years earlier about what his rapper friends thought of Jimmy's wheelchair seem almost prophetic. His relationship with Degrassi, however, appeared to evolve as his success grew. Rather than trying to erase Jimmy Brooks from his biography, Drake seemed increasingly comfortable allowing the character to become part of his mythology, referencing the show in interviews, laughing along with the jokes and occasionally reminding people that the global rap superstar they were watching had once spent his days filming a Canadian teen drama. In 2017, he posted a residual cheque from the series on social media with a joke that Degrassi money was still arriving. By that point, Drake had little left to prove about whether a former Degrassi actor could succeed in hip-hop, and the part of his history that had once complicated his attempts to be taken seriously could finally be treated with affection.

The following year, he made that reconciliation impossible to miss. In June 2018, Drake released the music video for I'm Upset, turning what had received a somewhat mixed reaction as a song into one of the most memorable celebrations of his Degrassi past. Directed by Karena Evans, the video was essentially a Degrassi: The Next Generation reunion disguised as a Drake video, bringing together a long list of familiar faces including Shane Kippel, Nina Dobrev, Stacey Farber, Jake Epstein, A.J. Saudin, Adamo Ruggiero, Lauren Collins, Cassie Steele, Ephraim Ellis and Stefan Brogren, along with Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith. Drake and his former castmates returned to the halls of Degrassi Community School for a reunion party filled with inside jokes and references to the series before the closing credits paired original footage from The Next Generation with new clips of the cast as the show's familiar theme song played. For millennials who had grown up watching Degrassi, the video felt like much more than a nostalgic class reunion. Drake had become one of the biggest stars on the planet and could have constructed a music video around virtually any fantasy or chapter of his life, yet he chose to return to the fictional high school where millions of viewers had first met him. There was also something fitting about the fact that the same chapter of his life that had once complicated his attempts to establish credibility as a rapper had become something he could now celebrate completely on his own terms. Years earlier, Graham had resisted allowing Degrassi to become a vehicle for his music; now, as one of the biggest artists in the world, Drake was bringing Degrassi into his music himself.

Jimmy Brooks prepared Drake for Drake

Nobody's post-Degrassi life has looked anything like Aubrey Graham's. As Drake, he became one of the most commercially successful recording artists of his generation, building a global brand while becoming deeply intertwined with the modern cultural identity of Toronto. Yet after all the records, awards, tours, feuds, memes and accolades, Jimmy Brooks has never completely disappeared from the story, and that does not diminish Drake's extraordinary success so much as make the route he took to get there even more unusual. It would be too simple to argue that Degrassi somehow created Drake, or that the sensitivity and vulnerability that later became signatures of his music can be directly traced back to Jimmy Brooks. What can be said is that before Drake built a career around translating heartbreak,

Source:Yahoo Entertainment News