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John Magaro swears he didn’t mean for any of this to happen.
An Ohio native who moved to New York City to work in theater, he promises he fell into film acting “randomly,” starting as “the little NYU pothead kid” in 2007’s The Brave One. For years he traded on his boyish looks to play much younger than his age, including a high school student in 2010’s My Soul to Take when he was well into his 20s. (“I was the oldest guy on set — ridiculous.”)
Like many working actors just starting out, Magaro, who’s now 41, didn’t know how long it would last. “I was worried once I aged out of that I was never gonna work again,” he tells me on this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “Then I was pretty lucky to get into soldiers, then you start playing young professionals, and then you’re playing a dad.”
What’s broken Magaro out of that familiar life cycle for journeyman actors — a name he proudly gives himself — is standout performances in big projects (2015’s The Big Short, Netflix’s Orange is the New Black) but especially the small ones. The combination of his lead role in Kelly Reichardt’s 2020 film First Cow and his supporting turn in last year’s Past Lives has made him the kind of actor who can make any film stand out. In The Day of the Fight, the directorial debut from Jack Huston that opens in limited release this week, Magaro has a single, stunning scene as a priest who’s also the childhood friend of Michael Pitt’s broken-down boxer character.
But it’s thanks to his turn in September 5, the docudrama thriller that opens nationwide on December 13 from Paramount, that Magaro suddenly seems very overdue for some major awards consideration.
In the ensemble drama from Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum, Magaro plays Geoffrey Mason, a real producer from the ABC Sports team who were firsthand witnesses to the kidnapping of the Israeli Olympic delegation in Munich in 1972. The film is a ticking-clock thriller, a detailed look at the work of journalism — and also a tragedy unfolding in slow-motion. The journalists think they are witnessing a heroic rescue attempt, not a dark chapter in Olympic history (all the hostages eventually were killed).
Magaro leads the film alongside his co-stars Peter Sarsgaard, Ben Chaplin and Leonie Benesch, but carries with him the spirit of someone who’s seemingly always known how to best fit into an ensemble and make it sing. “It’s about wanting to be an artist, I guess, and not be a movie star,” he explains, despite the fact that movie stardom has slowly come calling after all. “It’s understanding that I’d rather be a part of something that I believe in, even if it’s a small piece of it, as opposed to being the guy that’s saying constantly ‘look at me!’”
This week’s episode of the podcast also includes a conversation between me and The Atlantic’s Shirley Li about the upcoming rush of critics awards — the New York Film Critics Circle may still be deliberating as you read this — and why critics, who are by definition not Oscar voters, have such a major role to play at this point in the process. We spoke before Monday night’s Gotham Awards winners were announced, but identified big Gotham winners A Different Man and Sing Sing as titles that could benefit from a critical boost — which is precisely what they’ve just received.
