Happy Tuesday, everyone! A big episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast today. First up, Christopher Rosen and I wrap our five-part fall preview series by welcoming Variety’s Clayton Davis to help us take a look at a wide range of forthcoming indie releases — including Mike Leigh’s Bleecker Street drama, Tender Loving Care — plus the awards chances for already-released projects like Lionsgate’s Michael and Mubi’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Then, for the second half of the episode, I hand things over to Chris, who catches up with one of his all-time favorite interview subjects. I’ll let Chris take it from here!
Jake Johnson’s busy summer was more of a coincidence than anything else.
“The way it’s lining up is a little bit much,” he tells me.
In July, the first season of Johnson and Tatiana Maslany’s underrated Apple series Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed wrapped up with a righteous cliffhanger (bring this show back, Apple!), one week before the streaming platform debuted Johnson’s pickleball comedy movie, The Dink. Now, Johnson is back on screens in Joe Swanberg’s The Sun Never Sets, the first film project between the frequent collaborators in almost a decade. Toss in the upcoming NBC series Sunset P.I. set to premiere early next year, and it can start to feel like the former New Girl star is the hardest-working man in Hollywood.
“But what really happened for me was we had the pandemic and the strikes, and then I had taken time where I directed a movie, Self Reliance, and so there was a long chunk of time where I wasn’t saying yes to acting roles,” he says. “In that period, I realized how much I missed just acting.”
After breaking out on New Girl in 2011, Johnson amassed more than 35 film and television roles in just over a decade — everything from voice parts (including the Spider-Verse franchise) to blockbusters (Jurassic World) to indies like 2013’s Drinking Buddies, his first movie with Swanberg. On many projects, including Swanberg’s 2017 movie Win It All, Johnson also served as a producer and co-writer.
“The acting was such a childhood dream, but then I realized I didn’t like just showing up and being told what to do,” Johnson says. “Certain actors are really like clay, and they really want to be molded by the director. Once I got into the game, I realized how little I liked that idea.”
But as he gained more control over his career, Johnson, 48, realized he missed being directed; he longed to go back to being solely an actor. An illuminating experience occurred during production on 2021’s Ride the Eagle, which Johnson co-wrote and co-produced alongside playing the lead. While he was shooting a scene with J.K. Simmons, the sprinklers went off inside the building the production had rented for the day. Johnson and his fellow producers huddled with the building owner to handle the situation, and then he returned to film with Simmons. The Oscar winner, Johnson recalls, told him, “You’re focusing on so many different things, man. Let them do that.”
“I really didn’t get what he was saying,” Johnson says. “I was like, ‘Well, we’re filmmakers. We’re making the film. I financed this movie. I brought the fucking food, man. It’s in the back of my truck.’”
But the comment stuck with him. “The reason there’s a lot of jobs right now is that I’m not doing that,” he says, of his recommitment to just being a performer. “I’m just showing up and acting in projects — and they’re coming out easier.”
That’s evident in The Sun Never Sets. In the past, Johnson and Swanberg created their worlds together, and Johnson says he never felt directed in his performance. But that shifted for the new movie, which premiered at last year’s SXSW and is out now through IFC. Johnson plays Jack, a divorced father of two in a long-term relationship with his younger girlfriend, Wendy (Dakota Fanning). Concerned about their relationship dynamics, Jack makes a bold choice: He suggests a temporary split so that Wendy can date other people, and — he hopes — realize their relationship is what she actually wants. It’s a harebrained, selfish ploy made worse when Wendy reconnects with her ex-boyfriend, Chuck (Cory Michael Smith).
“I don’t relate to the Jack character at all,” Johnson says. “I don’t see myself in that world at all. I would go to Joe, and we would have conversations, and after each take, I would be like, ‘I’m trusting your instincts, not mine.’”
Johnson says he applied the same style on Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed (where he plays another unlikable, divorced dad in a bitter custody battle with his ex-wife) and in The Dink (where he’s a failed former tennis prodigy who strikes up an unlikely friendship with an older woman played by Mary Steenburgen). The result is three of the best performances of his career.
“I was deciding to lean into the tone of the project more than my own at times,” he says, of the shift in style. “It’s embarrassing at my age, but I was like, ‘This is kind of acting.’”
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