 While there he was in several school plays including "Annie", "Little Shop of Horrors", "Hard Times", and "West Side Story".He also acted in National Youth Theatre as a teenager before moving to Cardiff to study sport at the University of Wales Institute Cardiff (UWIC) in Wales.In Wales, Jackson started competitive boxing, entering in the British Universities Boxing Championships, an inter-university competition held throughout the whole of Britain, and won the gold at light middleweight.