Tyler James Williams Was ‘Ready’ to Direct His First Abbott Elementary Episode: ‘I’d Rather Work with Kids Than Adults’ (Exclusive)

Tyler James Williams knows how to juggle quite a few hats!

In an exclusive interview with PEOPLE in 10, the Abbott Elementary star, 32, opened up about directing his first episode of the Emmy Award-winning comedy, which airs on Feb. 5, and the unexpected challenges he faced with the job.

“[It was] very difficult. I don’t recommend it,” he said of acting and directing at the same time. “It’s a lot to split your brain, I think, and to focus on not only telling the story, but what your piece is to play in telling that story.”

“I knew it was going to be a challenge, but it was one I was ready for, so [I’m glad] I got a chance to do it,” he admitted before joking, “I’m also looking forward to the opportunity to be able to do one or the other, and not both all of the time.”

When asked what it was like to wrangle all of the child actors during the shoot, Williams revealed that the task was no problem and confessed, “I’d rather work with kids and adults a lot of the time.”

“Kids, as long as you learn how to speak their language, they want to do a good job,” he explained. “They want to work, their egos are not involved. They just kind of show up and they do their thing. It was really great.”

The actor recalled “several moments” where he had to get a “bunch of kids all on the same page” to pull off a few big scenes. He opened up about how it felt “really nice” to be able to get all of the young actors together and “coach them in the right direction and show them how to give levels of things.”

“Also, because [my character] Gregory is rather light in that episode, I wanted to kind of lean on them for our fourth wall breaking reactions. And it was really nice to kind of show them how to do that,” he added.

Williams recalled his own experiences as a child actor and explained that many “adult directors is they assume that kids process the working experience like any normal kid would, but actually they understand that they’re doing a job here.”

“I had this really beautiful moment with [a child actor named] Lela, who plays Courtney, where I explained to her what her character is doing in the episode,” he said. “I watched her in the science lab start to track that through and finds her own moments that weren’t being directed and stay in character, even when she didn’t have lines.”

“You give them a task and you show them what they’re doing, you can get some really beautiful things from it so it was nice to have been in that position and known that and be able to give them direction in that way,” he added.

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Abbott Elementary airs Wednesdays at 8:30 p.m. ET on ABC.