‘Self Reliance’s Jake Johnson Talks Inspiration Taken From Owen Wilson, Hollywood’s New Normal & Going Down A Road Less Traveled With His Career

Matt Grobar
·11 min read
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For better or worse, Jake Johnson knows who he is.

As a “45-year-old white dude,” he says, he knows that opportunities to direct for the big screen aren’t going to come along often. “In terms of directing, I’m not breaking at this point,” Johnson tells Deadline. “I’ve been on TV for too long. I’m not a new, young, exciting talent out of Sundance with a scarf where you go, ‘That’s a beautiful short, let’s see what he has.'” The town has seen what I do.”

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So when the opportunity came for the actor to make his directorial debut with Self Reliance, a comedic thriller co-starring Anna Kendrick that premiered at last year’s SXSW, he knew he’d bring all the “tones and ideas” that had been taking up space in his mind for years and squeeze them into one movie.

Debuting on Hulu today, following a one-night theatrical engagement via Neon, the film stars Johnson as Tommy, an ordinary Angeleno who is swept up into an unexpected adventure when he’s offered a million dollars to participate in a reality series for the dark web, which sees him on the run from people out to kill him. Early on in the process, he thinks he’s found the perfect loophole — they can only attack when he’s alone — but his problem is that none of his friends or family believe the game is real.

Johnson’s feature, drawing inspiration from Japanese reality TV, was also largely informed by the Covid pandemic and its reinforcing of the need for human connection, as well as a polarized political climate in which it seems that many have come to live in their own separate realities. “I’ve got some really good, old friends who are truly bonkers, who had some theories where I’m like, ‘You’re on another planet, my guy,'” Johnson laughs. “And everybody’s theories seem to have proof on the internet.”

As someone who likes to hear both sides of an argument, Johnson often finds himself going down the rabbit hole to research the theories in question — and in doing so, he’s been surprised to find that he understands how certain conclusions were drawn. This led him to think, “Wow, if everybody’s truth is real, then nobody’s truth can be real. This is wild.”

While the title Self Reliance refers to Tommy’s need to rely first and foremost on himself amidst his dangerous, oddball journey, it’s also an allusion to the famed transcendentalist essay by philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, which Johnson read at age 15, when he abruptly decided to drop out of school for a year.

“It was around that time where I started reading on my own for pleasure, and that transcendental movement, I kind of found because I was alone so much,” says the actor-filmmaker. “What I loved about that, and what I love about it for this movie is, if you really believe you’re right on something, it’s okay if no one believes you. I think there’s something really important about that for me in this time, where there’s a lot of group think on every team, and not a lot of individual thought, and when it comes out, it’s getting in trouble from all sides.”

But while Self Reliance certainly has a lot on its mind, Johnson makes sure to underscore that the film should not be misconstrued as a teaching tool. In fact, for this artist who misses the time when Hollywood provided “great escapism,” the intention was to foster a totally different kind of experience. Having come up idolizing “the John Candys of the world,” who provided a reprieve from the problems of the real world with their work, his hope was simply for the film to entertain and distract viewers enough to keep them off their phones over the course of its 85 minutes.

In reflecting on the experience of making the feature, Johnson notes that he’s not really a natural director — or a natural actor, for that matter. “I feel like if I was an athlete,” he says, “I’d be a utility player. I wouldn’t have a true position, for better or worse.”

Still, if Johnson broke out with Fox’s beloved sitcom New Girl, which retains an avid fanbase even after being off the air for six years, as well as a number of indie darlings, what many might not know about the creative is that he’s as much a writer as he is an actor, having generated his own material and created his own opportunities from the beginning of his career.

For the Illinois native, who began writing plays during his time at the University of Iowa, writing has been “the great escape,” ever since the age of 16. (Over the years, he’s seen five of his scripts produced, though he jokes that the amount he’s penned that have gone unproduced is “truly shameful.”) Johnson honed his singular sense of comedic timing, as a performer, over the course of many years on stage doing sketch comedy, his ambition in looking at a career in entertainment being just to have “a spot at the Hollywood table” for a moment and see how long he could make that moment last. “I know I’m not the handsomest dude. I know I’m not the most talented guy. I know I’m not the obvious pick,” he says. “I’m never going to do steroids and get really strong.”

During college, Johnson decided that he wanted to be “a really cool playwright guy” like David Mamet, seeing all of his work come out like “American Buffalo, three people in one room” — “really freeform, weirdo ideas with no structure.” In addition to the Murray and Belushi brothers of Chicago, another major influence for him was Owen Wilson — and not just because they both have “funky noses,” Johnson jokes. While he came up in awe of the actor’s performance in Wes Anderson’s debut feature Bottle Rocket, which he found to be admirably “funny and sad and weird,” what he was most impressed by was Wilson’s partnership with Anderson as a writer, which would culminate in an Academy Award nomination for The Royal Tenenbaums. This, he says, was the kind of collaboration he wanted to be a part of.

While further honing his writing at NYU, Johnson had three-act structure drilled into his brain, though as someone with dyslexia, whose brain is “not structured,” he fought the lesson hard. In terms of the stories he tells, he’s not interested in in-depth backstory, but rather the arc and growth of a character. What he loves in movies is a character who’s “down on his luck,” a tone that’s often hilariously strange, and a world that reflects a certain middle class “feeling of America.” In terms of shooting, he adds, “I like neighborhoods. I like little houses that feel like the north side of Chicago. I like families. I like love stories.”

He doesn’t care about “the uber rich,” he continues, or about “people who are really clean. So there’s just certain stories I’m not going to tell because I don’t want to think about them while I’m writing. I don’t want to be on set. I don’t want set dec to do it.”

As someone who likes to go to the same restaurants and eat the same meals, and who has often turned away from a more mainstream trajectory in favor of work on passion projects, Johnson acknowledges that he’s “pretty narrow” in his interests. “Most movies that I see and TV shows, I personally couldn’t care less about. A lot of what Hollywood really celebrates, I’ve always felt on the outside of,” he admits. “It always feels like, ‘What are we doing? What is this? Why is everyone pretending this is so good?'”

In any case, you can rest assured that any project Johnson takes on will be one that truly matters to him. His instinct to remain within his somewhat narrow lane — doing what he loves, and what he’s good at — is informed by a theory he heard espoused years ago by Howard Stern. “If people like you for something, don’t stop until they stop. If there’s a tone that people like, I don’t want to go, ‘If you loved me in New Girl, wait till you see me as a serial murderer,'” he deadpans. “I want to keep changing the game a little bit, and for me, if this is a premise that works for you, well, let me see if I can move it a little bit to the right, a little bit to the left. Let me see if I can keep massaging this, as long as I have fun with it and the audience does.”

For Johnson, one of the highlights of making Self Reliance was being back amongst an ensemble of major comedic talents, also featuring the likes of Natalie Morales, Mary Holland, Emily Hampshire, Christopher Lloyd, and Wayne Brady. Seeing him riff off of this group reminds one of the ensemble comedy sensibility embraced by the likes of Judd Apatow and Nicholas Stoller from the late ’90s on, in such modern classics as Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which can very rarely be found on the big screen anymore.

Johnson marvels at the fact that even if comedy features are made, at a time when they’re not really considered “theatrical,” the days of casting them up with great comedic talents seem to have wound down. “There’s certain big movies, like a big comedy now, they’re trying to get such huge stars in it to guarantee that it works that you get a professional wrestler, you get somebody who could be the president, you get LeBron James,” he reflects. “You go, what happened to comedic actors? How about a 30-year-old Eugene Levy and a Catherine O’Hara? Who are those guys?”

Certainly, the film landscape has changed a great deal since the days when tiny gems, like the Johnson-starring Drinking Buddies, Safety Not Guaranteed and Digging for Fire, could attract a decent audience in theaters. Instead of a talk show appearance, Johnson finds, “word of mouth and a trailer and artwork that appeals to you” can be much more defining factors today in packing out a theater. The difference between the Hollywood of today and that of even a decade ago, he believes, is that now, so much content is available that it can make great indie projects significantly harder to find. “There used to be just way less stuff, and so if you made a movie like Drinking Buddies, we went to a festival and it did well, and then all of a sudden, it started to spread and everybody in Hollywood seemed to see it. That rarely happens anymore,” he says. “Now, you need to have that 1% show. Like, everybody’s seen The Bear.“

Rather than being daunted by this new normal, though, Johnson is leaning in, at peace with the fact that interesting work will always be made, even if it’s more difficult to locate amidst the current chaos of the entertainment ecosystem. “What I find exciting about this era is that you’re finding niche audiences,” he says. “It’s not Old Hollywood where there’s four channels and 10 movies. There’s 150,000 channels…but audiences find what they want to find.”

Even if he enjoyed his experience with Self Reliance, Johnson says he’s “kind of done” directing features for the moment. He’s open to helming commercials or a pilot, though he says he’d “never” direct a big studio feature given the “judo” needed to navigate the notes process. He acknowledges that he’s put himself in an unusual and somewhat “tricky” position, given the doors he’s shut on his own filmmaking career, and his tendency not to work as “an actor for hire,” despite his skills in both areas. Still, he continues to create his own fun opportunities, including We’re Here to Help, a warm and wacky advice podcast co-hosted with comedian Gareth Reynolds, which has performed quite well since its August launch.

The good news for Johnson is the fact that regardless of the opportunities that do or do not come along, he has the good fortune of some lucrative projects in his rearview mirror, which give him the leverage to be choosy. “I am in a spot where if that stuff doesn’t happen, I’m not chasing it,” he says. “The spotlight does not mean that much. It doesn’t fulfill me.”

Johnson has also “never cared about the awards, about the red carpets, about that feeling of it,” even if he respects those that do. “So for me going forward, when you say, how do I plan the career? I don’t,” he says. “It has to be the people. It has to be that right thing, and it just has to work out. And if it doesn’t work out, it’s been a hell of a ride.”

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