Jonathan Majors on playing Jesse Brown in ‘Devotion’: ‘I was just bowled over by how heroic he was’ [Complete Interview Transcript]
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Black Reel Awards nominee Jonathan Majors recently chatted with Gold Derby’s Denton Davidson about Sony Pictures Releasing’s biographical film “Devotion.” He takes on the role of a real-life person, Ensign Jesse Brown, the first Black naval officer in the 1950s, alongside Glen Powell as Lieutenant Junior Grade Tom Hudner. “When I read the script, I was just bowled over by how heroic he was in battle and outside of battle,” he explains.
Majors discusses the depth of inspiration, improving from his own experiences, and having to partake in flight school for the blockbuster hit. Currently, the actor can be seen in theaters as Kang the Conqueror in Marvel’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and his next project will be as Damian Anderson in “Creed III.” He received a Best Drama Actor Emmy nomination in 2021 for “Lovecraft Country.”
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Watch the full video above and read the complete interview transcript below.
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Denton Davidson: I am Denton Davidson for Gold Derby here with Jonathan Majors who stars in “Devotion,” an inspirational true story about a pair of US Navy fighter pilots who risked their lives during the Korean War and become some of the Navy’s most celebrated wingmen. Jonathan, you played Jesse Brown, who is a true American hero. He broke down a lot of barriers. He’s the only Black person in naval flight officer training at the time. This is the 1940s. I had never heard of him before, and that’s why films like this are so important. I’m curious if you had heard of him and what were your first thoughts when you were offered this role?
Jonathan Majors: Well, I hadn’t heard of him until I read the script. And when I read the script, I was just bowled over by how heroic he was in battle and outside of battle. I mean, this is pre MLK, pre Malcolm X. The Civil Rights movement is needed, but not anywhere close to beginning in that way. And so he was a true maverick, a true trailblazer. And there’s some correlations and connections between us. The fact that he was from Mississippi, and though Mississippi and Texas where I’m from are not the same place in any way, but there’s a certain mentality with the communities that we both grew up in. And he was just so heroic what he’s done and what he did. And he brought himself from the fields of sharecropping to the sky. And was not just a naval aviator, which is near impossible, he was the best naval aviator at the time. And it’s very rare that I do a piece and I look at a character and I go, oh wow, I think I just played my hero. And this was definitely that singular case.
DD: Does it feel different as an actor when you’re playing a real person, or at least for this one, you don’t feel like you really have to imitate anything because we don’t know his personality. But does it feel different as an actor when you’re playing a real person for you?
JM: Well, you’re still trying to get the room. You’re still trying to get to the truth, but the steps are a bit different. With a character fiction, you’re activated to use your imagination a great deal and kind of paint that way. And then when you get a character who was a living, breathing person and made real impact in a life, and in Jesse’s case history, it’s more inspiration rather than the form of imagination where you look to see, okay, what is inspiring this person to do this? How are they inspiring me? And then in the case of Jesse, where there was so little. There’s no recordings, there were a lot of write-ups. And so you got to look at his actions. And that in many cases is, I mean, as you know, just living life.
It doesn’t matter what someone says. Actually, it doesn’t even matter what someone says about you. What you do, the physics of it, you got from point A to point B. The things you do are the most important things, and therefore you can be inspired by that. And that inspires the outline and the foundation of the character for Jesse.
DD: There are some powerful moments where he’s looking at himself in the mirror, and he recites really every awful racist negative thing people have said about him all his life. And he keeps a journal and keeps all of it written down. What was it like filming those moments and did that get to you at all filming that?
JM: Well, you want it to get to you. It has to because if it gets to me, it’ll get to you. And it’ll touch the audience and move the audience. And my hope was that in that moment we could take them through the same ritual that Jesse was going through. And a couple things are happening in the scene. I’m going through something, Jesse’s going through something, and the audience is going through something. And then there’s a fourth character, which is the reflection of Jesse. That’s who the scene is between. There’s actually two people in the scene. There’s Jesse, and then there’s the reflection while we’re playing it in the mirror.
And yeah, it did get to me, but it had to. And primarily because if I hurt, they hurt. And then if I heal, they heal. Mirror neurons, isn’t it? Mirror neurons. Interesting, because in the moment and when people see the picture, it’s really important. It’s not important to me, I don’t care how you really look at it, but when you look at it in this totality, you see that the arc of it is, yeah, it’s emotional and there’s a breaking, but there’s also a pretty immediate rising of a phoenix that happens. And then chiefly, there’s an acknowledgement of it, which then puts steel inside of him and allows him to do what he needs to do to continue his personal life mission. You said something that he wrote down every single, that is not nearly every single negative pejorative, racial, bigoted thing that’s been said to him.
That was probably just last… All of that from that moment is just thinking about the context of it. It’s probably, I know there’s a flight school, flight training comment in there, but the interesting part was, and the melding of the actor and the character really come together there is because that was what’s said in the film is an improvisation of what was on the script. And I was improving from my own personal experience, marrying that with Jesse’s experience. And again, in Texas, Mississippi, et cetera, two little Black boys trying, one trying to get on the movie screen and one trying to get in the air. There are some correlations. So one is a bit more ambitious to be clear, just a bit more ambitious. So you have to go there and say things that do hurt so you can actually heal. And you don’t shake it off. You heal from it when it’s over with.
DD: And in terms of the technical aspects and being a pilot, what sort of things did you have to learn before getting into this role? Was that all in the script for you or did you really have to go through a lot of that?
JM: I mean, we did it. I mean, Black Label, which is our producers, and Glen Powell was quite instrumental in it as he’s a pilot, an actual pilot, J.D. Dillard, who is the son of a naval aviator. His father was second African American Blue Angel, which is an extremely, extremely prestigious and skilled fleet. So I don’t like to pretend as little as possible. And they set the playground up. So yeah, I got to do a lot of flight school, a lot. I got to do my share of it, what was necessary.
And had the Corsair manual, which is the hero plane as you see us fly around in the film. And I memorized that to the best of my ability, studied it properly the way Jesse would’ve, the way all the 32s would have. And yeah, we got up in those planes and we flew, and we put some hours in. And the maneuvers, I mean the opening sequence that you guys will see, that’s in camera. We did that whole sequence from take-off to landing is in camera. And as beautiful as it is, it is quite intense for somebody who doesn’t fly planes. It’s not your commercial Delta flight.
These things are, I mean, it’s a miracle, a flight is. And how would you say that? The acknowledgement of the miracle in your body is not as divine as you may think it is. I mean, there’s a lot of chaos that’s happening, you know what I mean? Until you get used to it, and we definitely dealt with that. But it was in those moments as crazy as I was feeling where I felt closest to Jesse, because that’s something he would’ve experienced without a doubt. He experienced that. It was quite intense.
DD: And you mentioned Glen Powell, you have a lot of scenes with Glen. I mean, it’s you two at the center of this film. He plays, Tom Hudner. What was it like filming with him, these two guys from completely different worlds that are coming together as naval officers and building this trust in a time where that trust was not typical?
JM: Well, I mean, that’s a great question. And the trust element is something that was for Jesse to explore. That he couldn’t trust of what he experienced. People putting weights in his flight suit, holding him under, these are all things that we talk about in the film and also things that are said, are shared rather with Tom. So yeah, we built that relationship from the beginning, from the time we met in the Russian Turkish bath in New York City and had our chat, artist to artist, about if we were ready to do this together. And we were. And the crafting of the relationship, it was quite sophisticated, I think, because we did not want to do the standard 1990s. I mean, there are films made recently that would lean into essentially selling out and taking the shortcut to this relationship. They don’t like each other, they’re best friends in the play.
I mean, when it’s so much more complex than that, so much more nuance than that. Which is one of the reasons the film is so relevant because race relations in America and abroad, but just speaking as an American, are so precarious. And there are so many of us that want to take shortcuts to it. And it’s a conversation. It’s an ongoing conversation. And from the beginning of the film, you watch Tom and Jesse engage in that. And because maybe there’s something about the crucible of just being in the Navy together and also seeing yourself in another individual that you wouldn’t expect to see it in. It allowed us to engender a relationship that wasn’t buddy buddy but soul to soul.
And therefore, we have a story that yes, we touch on the friendship element and the best buddy element and the Fly Boy wingman element, but ultimately it’s a story about two men who are devoted to the same thing and therefore, find themselves as twin flames, as soulmates, which is why we have a film because it is the steel sharpening steel that allows for legacy to be born. And the Tom Hudner legacy is connected completely to the Jesse Brown legacy. I mean, that was our conversation. That was our work to be done. And Glen is, I mean, he’s just so willing and just so openhearted and curious about how we could have done that. And that’s what we tried to do.
DD: One of the scenes that hit home for me was when he was talking about they switch planes, they get these newer planes, and Jesse can’t see. You have to rely on this guy doing this to land the plane. And everyone’s like, why don’t you just land the plane? And it’s at that moment when he sort of lets everyone realize you don’t necessarily trust the guy doing this. Who’s that guy and why should you trust him to land you? So what were those scenes like to film?
JM: Yeah. Well, I mean those were quite modern scenes where you don’t want to. There’s secrets. There’s always secrets in a play and in a story where you go, oh, we going to talk about that? You know what I mean? Where it’s like, yeah. I went to the drama teacher to talk about the… Actually a white guy who was talking to me, for lack of a better term, his star pupil. This is theater, obviously, not academics. And talking to me, he says, there’s this third eye. I was doing this, we did this thing in Texas. It’s all over the nation, but forensics, right? Speech and debate and this and that, blah, blah, blah. I happened to participate in a theatrical venue called dramatic interpretation. And you would go, you’d be judged. You would be judged is how it goes. And you move through the rounds, you’d do your presentation.
And he spoke to me once about the third eye, and I thought, what the fuck are you talking about? And maybe he shouldn’t have told me, but I realized that’s something I always had. Where you go, is this happening to me because I’m talented or more to the case? Is this happening to me because I’m Black? Or is this happening to me because it is what it is? You know what I mean? And that was something that that’s a secret. He told me that at 14, 15 years old. And I’m thinking, oh, shit, did I break out of this round because I’m Black or did I break out of this round because I was the best performer in the room? It happens when you get pulled over. Am I getting pulled over because I’m Black? That distrust is something that this country has laid into the psyche of African Americans, and Jesse has that. And we don’t talk about that in cinema.
We don’t talk about that in films. You’re supposed to be stoic and trustworthy or the batty, batty, you know what I mean? We don’t talk about the nuances. I don’t know if they’re going to try to sync my Black ass. You know what I mean? I don’t know if they’re going to try to, every time I get in the plane, I don’t know if my mechanic going to fuck my shit up. You know what I mean? Because they didn’t want to see a Black man in the sky. This is the big of the country we’re living in. And as honorable and moral and merit based as the Armed Services are, I mean, them fellas come from a certain place. All of us do. And so the transcend race is a hope. It’s not the rule.
DD: Can you talk about working with director J.D. Dillard on this and what that experience was like on his set?
JM: I mean, J.D., there are scripts and then there’s director pairings where you go, oh, that’s perfect. And I’ve been fortunate where I think, oh yeah, but then there are films you go, anybody could direct us. I mean, anybody could direct this. Devotion and J.D. Dillard, that’s a match made in heaven. It feels divine in many ways. This whole process has been. But it feels divine in many ways. I mean, what are the odds that you have a capable African-American director telling this story that has a huge African-American point of view. Furthermore, it’s dealing with the Navy, furthermore is dealing with naval aviation. And that individual is the son of a naval aviator and is a young man that has the energy and the spit and piss and vinegar inside of him to make a film. ‘Cause that’s difficult. It’s hard to make a film.
It takes a great deal of energy to do that, to lead a film. Well, also to direct a film. And we had that cornucopia of talents in one individual in J.D. And he could speak to us with the authority that’s needed for us to trust and fly. He and I had an extremely, and to this day, have a very interrelationship in so far. Thing about a director is, I was actually speaking to a few friends of mine about this last night, is relationship between a director and the lead actor, is that of the president and his therapist. You know what I mean? That actor they’ve got, it’s on them. You know what I mean? You can’t help them. Director can’t. Scorsese can’t get in there and do it for De Niro. You know what I mean?
DD: I got it.
JM: He’s got to do it. You know what I mean? But he’s the greatest enabler. The director has to be the greatest enabler and buffer and guider and leader in many ways. And I mean, our relationship is so that it even transcends the film. I ask him about, should I do this magazine cover, man? What do you think? You know what I mean? We have that type of relationship. I’m off course. But no, he’s perfect. He was perfect for the film and perfect for this group of guys. He got in there and really helped us build, helped us do the invisible work and his knowledge of aviation and what it is to be essentially an Air Force brat or Navy brat, excuse me, was quite helpful because he could give insight to what it was within those four walls of the Brown house because he’d been there.
Furthermore, he brought his father to work to be a consultant so he could talk about angles of planes and Gs and all these things, but he could also say, he wouldn’t mind me saying this, “Hey dad, tell me again what it was like when you had to tell Mom you were going out. Tell me what that was again.” And he could have that conversation in Producer’s village or Director’s village, and then walk over to set, which is just 20 paces and a curtain away, and say that and whisper that to me and Christina Jackson playing Daisy. And we would have it directly from the source. There was no game. There’s no game of telephone with J.D.
DD: And before we go, I just want to take it back a little bit because we haven’t spoken to you at Gold Derby since you received an Emmy nomination for Lovecraft Country. What was that like to just get that major recognition for the first time? And your career is just awesome. You have a lot of great projects going on. What was that moment like when you got that first nomination?
JM: Oh man, I mean, the thing is, I was also shooting King at the time. This whole thing, it’s been so… Here’s the thing. I feel like it’s been steady. I’ve been at it for, I’m a young cat yet, I’m 33 years old. But yeah, I’ve been at it since I was 13 years old, sincerely. You know what I mean? But there are moments where you go, what? You know what I mean? And I remember watching in the kitchen on my laptop. I was like, I’m going to watch. I’m going to watch. I just had it up, and I saw my little picture come up. And I went, oh my God, this is literally, oh my God, this is incredible. I’m so humbled by it. I can’t believe this is happening. And there’s no way I’m going to win.
But I’m so happy to be just in the number because it’s about acknowledgement. The acknowledgement of Atticus Freeman and Lovecraft Country was so important, was important. And that was a tough year too. So for that performance and that story to push through, and for me to be the one, the tip of the spear in that it was emboldening, man. I mean, I have so much confidence in art, so much confidence in our industry, as hardheaded as our industry can be. And I think we really got something. There’s real movement happening, and I’m happy to be a part of it. And the Emmy was one of the big moments where I went, oh yeah, it’s on for sure. Yeah.
DD: Well, you mentioned Kang and we’ve seen the “Creed III” poster. I’m not even going to ask about it ’cause I know you can’t give anything away. But “Rocky III” with Mr. T was my favorite one growing up. So I’m just going to assume “Creed III” is going to be mine as well. But Jonathan, I want to thank you for talking with us about “Devotion” today. It’s on November 23rd in theaters. I saw it in an early screening. And I mean, I don’t even know how to describe it. The audience reaction was profound. I will say that. So congratulations on a beautiful film.
JM: Yeah, my pleasure, man. Talk to you soon. Thank you.
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