There tend to be two paths available to an actor who faces the end of a long-running and star-making sitcom. The first is performing a vanishing act, never to be heard of again except for a single TMZ article, decades later, attesting to just how “unrecognisable” they’ve become. The second is super stardom, by way of tentpole franchises and often, but not always, comic-book adaptations.
When leaving New Girl after seven years as its lovable couch potato Nick Miller, Jake Johnson gave the latter a go. He dipped his feet into the world of blockbusters with films like Jurassic World and Tom Cruise’s The Mummy, but found the waters tepid. Toxic, even. “Have you ever seen a salmon that’s been pulled out of the river for too long?” Johnson says now, his face contorting into a grimace. “It’s not a happy ending. Keep that salmon in the stream.”
This salmon’s particular stream, though, is drying up. “Mid-level budget movies…” sighs the actor, sounding nostalgic way past his 48 years. “Right now there’s two types of movie happening, and that is the billion-dollar franchise and the super cool indie. But there used to be a middle-type of movie where you just go, ‘Man, that was a fun 90 minutes.’ It’s not the coolest thing that’s ever been shot. But it’s also not 75 A-list actors and IPs coming together, which I’m glad we have for theatres – but there used to be a whole middle class of movies and they’re disappearing.”
Johnson is doing his part to fight back, with his new film sitting squarely in that bracket. Something of a cross between Happy Gilmore and Dodgeball, The Dink follows Dusty, a failed tennis prodigy who picks up the much-ridiculed sport of pickleball following a wrist injury (cue the masturbation jokes). It’s funny, with a big heart and an easy-to-root-for protagonist who stumbles his way through a three-act redemption arc. It is, to borrow Johnson’s phrase, the exact sort of movie you leave thinking, “Man, that was a fun 90 minutes.” (In fact, it clocks in at 102.)
Incidentally, Johnson had planned to carry on with pickleball after wrapping The Dink – he and his buddy, the actor Justin Long, went so far as to buy rackets – but he quickly got distracted. “I’m a phase guy,” he says now, by way of explanation. His latest phase involves great big gargantuan weights and “seeing how much heavy stuff I can lift over my head – you know, as you do as you get older.”
No matter how old he gets, Johnson will forever be known to some as the slacker with a heart of gold from New Girl, the guy that uses a paper bag instead of a wallet and kisses like a coal miner coming home to his wife. Johnson doesn’t mind the association. “Nick is the closest character I’ve ever played to my comedic rhythm and to what I find funny in life,” he says. “That tone of Nick is so close to my heart.”
“My dream was always to be in this business, and it’s not like I moved to LA and a week and a half later I was on New Girl,” he says. “There were a lot of years of this old club failing. I would walk into auditions and I would see on their faces, ‘Oh my God, we hate what you’re doing.’ And I was like, ‘Man, this s*** is not working.’ With Liz [Merriweather, the creator], it was the opposite. She wanted more.”
Anyway, it would be different if he were to be indelibly linked with, say, Jeffrey Dahmer, Johnson laughs. “So yes, great… Call me Nick on the subway when I’m 80! Awesome, man. I lived a dream life because of that son of a bitch.”
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To this day, Johnson will find himself in situations that feel so Nick-esque that he wants to ring Merriweather right then and there. Just last night, he decided to take a bath in his hotel room at one o’clock in the morning. “As I was filling it, I just wanted to call Liz and be like, ‘Just so you know, I’m going through the ugliest phase that my body has ever been in, and I’m about to soak the whole thing in a tub of soup. And I wanted you to know that.’” On that note, when I ask how he reflects on the studio’s request that he lose weight for the role of Nick, he says: “I think Fox was right! I came in tubby! Who doesn’t love chips and tortillas?” But wasn’t the dad-bod part of Nick’s appeal? “Not at the beginning,” Johnson laughs. “It’s not what Fox wanted.”
The way Johnson’s career has gone – swerving away, tyre marks on the tarmac, from more star-making turns and top-billing tentpoles – has led to an assumption that he’s perhaps not as ambitious as his peers. It’s a false assumption.
“I think I work harder than most people on planet earth,” says Johnson. “I mean, not people who have really hard jobs – some guy on a construction site in Lower Manhattan is thinking, ‘F*** off. I’m literally carrying a pipe’ – I mean, in my industry. But because I don’t have the same goals, it might seem like I’ve passed on certain jobs, but that doesn’t mean I stop working.” Especially now, he says, “I burn out all the time, but I fundamentally believe these are my working years; your late forties are your working years. My body still works enough. My brain is still good enough. And so I want to be working, and I feel so fortunate that I have my dream job. I don’t want my seat at the table to go away just yet.”
That said, Johnson isn’t the kind of actor who is going to spend the better part of a year away from his twin daughters and wife in a remote location with no running water for the sake of it. “I’m not gonna have a bad nine months to be in a good movie that makes a billion dollars,” he says. “Those nine months mean more to me than the movie. So it all has to work or, for me, it’s not worth it.”
Hearing Johnson speak about his profession is refreshing. Acting isn’t everything. It’s not even his everything. It’s good work. It can even be important work. But at the end of the day, it’s just not that deep. He didn’t always have that perspective – certainly not when he started acting as a teenager, obsessed with the works of David Mamet, Sam Shephard and John Patrick Shanley. “I was as pretentious as it gets,” says Johnson. “The idea of Method acting and those Seventies actors was everything I cared about. Then, as I’ve gotten older, I find it to be a tad performative.”
His problem isn’t with Method acting; it’s with all the talk about Method acting. “I don’t care if I smell booze on my scene partner’s breath if they’re good in a scene – this is show business; we’re not operating on children – so if you’re good in the scene, and in order to do that you needed to pretend to be Larry, then f***ing pretend to be Larry, but I don’t want to hear about it,” he says. “And if you’re a Method actor doing all this but you’re dogs*** on action, I think you gotta rethink your choices.”
That said, he can’t say he is totally opposed to going Method. “I mean, I can do a bit with Michael Cera that lasts four months!” He just doesn’t feel the need to talk about it.
I want to sit in a scene, hear someone call ‘action’, and disappear with Tom Cruise for three minutes
Johnson developed his funny bone together with his oldest brother at home in Illinois, where the number one goal was to make their mum laugh. “We’ve been doing bits, and talking about what makes a good performance and a bad performance, since we were five and eight,” he says. “I think one of the first words I ever learnt was ‘hack’, because we would watch something and go, ‘That’s hacky!’”
There is one big-budget film that Johnson is glad he did – even if he still would never do it again. In 2017, he played the comedic sidekick to Tom Cruise’s hero in a remake of The Mummy. “The director called me and said, ‘Tom Cruise would like to improvise with you,’” recalls Johnson now, “which is not what happened… but I thought, man, that is so cool. Tom Cruise is such a good actor, and I want to learn from the dude. I want to sit in a scene, hear someone call ‘action’, and disappear with Tom Cruise for three minutes. I don’t care about the script.”
Or at least, he didn’t until he actually read it. “It’s a f***ing action movie for two months, with him and me running around Afghanistan with buildings blowing up. I don’t want to do that,” says Johnson. Cruise asked for a meeting in LA. “He’s so persuasive, and what I didn’t know is that he’s also funny and he teases you,” says Johnson. The charm offensive worked. Not for nothing, his wife was on board too, keen to hear all the stories about stuff that would inevitably transpire on set. “He’s one of the most fascinating guys on planet earth.”
Johnson is happy with the choice he made all those years ago, to slam the door on fame and fortune in favour of smaller fare (and smaller fortune). “There was a whole trajectory of what certain people are chasing, and it’s great for them and it’s awesome,” he says. “But that certain type of career, I don’t want that. I like the level I’m at a lot.”
‘The Dink’ is streaming on Apple TV
