"Coming 2 America" star Jermaine Fowler surprises former Maryland high school teacher

Star of the new Prime Video film "Coming 2 America" Jermaine Fowler, who also grew up in Prince George's County and attended Northwestern High School, joined FOX 5 on Wednesday to surprise his former high school teacher.

Andre Lee reached out to FOX 5 letting us know that he taught Fowler at Northwestern from 2004 to 2006. FOX 5's Kevin McCarthy coordinated with Fowler to join a Zoom with him and Lee to surprise Lee and let the student and teacher reconnect.

Fowler was in two of Lee's television production classes, a time he remembers fondly.

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"That was a great era," Lee says, "because our program was still kind of in its embryonic stages of development and Jermaine came through there at a time where great things were beginning to happen."

Fowler says he has taken the lessons he learned in Lee's class and applied them to his career today.

"What I learned in Mr. Lee's class was how to create," Fowler says. "I would make short films at Plaza Towers on Belcrest Road in Hyattsville. That's where I would learn to make movies, make things happen. But, in Mr. Lee's class, that's where I learned how to edit them and structure them and format everything."

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Lee says Fowler would visit him twice a year at Northwestern before the COVID-19 pandemic and he would always ask Fowler to speak to his students about his path to success.

"When I'm in that position to talk to the students, I go, 'They're not going to listen to me,'" Fowler says. "Because kids respond to examples. So I hope there are some folks from that school who have seen 'Coming 2 America' and 'Judas and the Black Messiah' and can say, 'Oh, I can do this now.'"