John C. Reilly thinks audiences just want to be surprised. He’d do (almost) anything to oblige. A conversation with LaneBrown
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In some ways, I felt similar to Jerry. Like him, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth — I come from a working-class family in Chicago — so I knew what it felt like to be an outsider who comes to L.A. seeking their fortune. He also reminded me of my dad, that generation of man that was unapologetically macho, that had seen real hardship. So I was intuiting my dad’s energy.
Jerry was a product of his time, but I don’t think he was especially macho. In my experience, macho people who are headstrong and think they always have the best answer are not the most effective leaders. Jerry was someone like me who was able to become a beta male when necessary. He knew when to defer to the women in his life, or to a player or coach with a big ego, when they had better ideas than he did. He could be like, “All right, you’re the boss. You’re the one who knows more about this.
I went to a Lakers game and was in the lounge waiting for the game to start, and she came up to me and said, “Hi, I’m Jeanie Buss.” I was like, Whoa. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be thrown out of the building or what. She said, “Listen, the team’s not participating in the show, so I’m not here to say anything good or bad about it. But I wanted to tell you something personal: My dad knew who you were.
That’s the thing about actors: You can have achieved so much, but when you become unemployed, you don’t feel like a movie star — you feel like an unemployed actor. I was just sitting there thinking, Man, I got nothing going on. Because at that moment, I didn’t. Is there a legion? I don’t know. I’m not in touch with that legion, but I hope there isn’t anything people aren’t willing to let me do. That said, I do have things that guide whether or not I do a movie. A lot of times, it’s the worldview of the character. I’ve been offered roles of unethical people that are so far outside of my universe, like pedophiles and murderers. I don’t think it’s wrong to play those characters; I just don’t want to spend six months inside their heads.
And then after those scenes, I found it was important to be honest with myself: You just went through something traumatic: the death of your mother. Even though you were pretending and it wasn’t technically your mother, it felt like it. So be nice to yourself tonight. Take a bath and then try to let it go.
I learned how to do that by doing musicals. When you’re singing a song, you’re trying to keep it technically perfect and sing it with enough breath and stay in tune and pronounce the words clearly. But you’re also trying to emotionally experience what’s going on in the song, and if you get too emotional, you can’t sing because you start to blubber. It’s a great way to learn the disciplines of communication and feel and not to let one compromise the other.
I can tell you what it’s like to work with Paul. He’s someone who’s so excited to see what you’re going to do next. That sounds like an obvious thing, but having one person’s complete attention while you’re acting is important. You would be amazed at the number of film sets where the director is looking at the monitor or worried about what the lighting or camera is doing.
No, I don’t worry about that. I actually disagree with your premise. In my experience, people like it when they can relate to you. So when your character seems like an everyday person, or however you’d describe it, that creates more relatability and emotional connection. I don’t know. I hope so, because that was a personal role and I really felt connected to it. Paul saw I was capable of doing more than character work, that I was someone who could carry a story. And actually, what I said to him was, “Hey, you’ve got to write me my Sunrise.” What I meant was a movie called Sunrise from the 1920s. It’s this romantic story. I can’t even remember what it’s about, but at that point, I had just seen it.
You’re right. Adam McKay tapped into this moment of infantilization, this idea in our culture that you have to be as hip as an 18-year-old for your entire life — you have to wear cool sneakers and the right concert T-shirt as an adult. Whereas my dad looked at that and was like, I don’t want to dress like a teenager. Teenagers are stupid. I’m a grown-ass man. I’m going to wear men’s clothes. I don’t give a shit what you think is hip.
Winning Time uses a similar trick to evoke its time period. It uses different film stocks and old broadcast cameras. When I started doing movies, it was all white men. If you’re away from home for six months, it’s not that fun to spend all of your time with just men or people of the same race. Certain departments have always had women, but the camera departments had barely any women for the first 15 or 20 years in my career. That was a bummer. Men can get pretty crude, and it ends up feeling like the Army.
This is sort of a random question, but you made a cameo on A$AP Mob’s 2017 album, Cozy Tapes Vol. 2: Too Cozy. How did that happen?
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