Jake Johnson Just Wants You To Laugh
When you watch Jake Johnson on-screen, it feels like you're spending time with a friend. The kind of friend you can crack a beer open with. The kind of friend who's going to make you laugh, but after 3 or 4 or 8 of those beers starts getting into some deeper conversations than we expected from a night sitting on the couch. For 7 seasons and 146 episodes, he played just that as Nick Miller, the snarky-yet-often blissfully unaware law school dropout-turned-bartender on FOX's New Girl, a comforting presence that has likely reached more screens than ever during months of quarantine lockdown.
Johnson was a breakout star during the series' run, and his portrayal continues to earn praise today, two years after the show's conclusion. Earlier this month, Nick Miller was ranked the 31st best character of the 21st century in a Thrillist feature; a Bustle story from June was titled "Why Are We Still So Obsessed With New Girl's Nick Miller?" and BuzzFeed quizzes in his honor still pop up with regularity.
But part of the whole being on-screen thing can be a drag, he says. "Acting on camera, it takes a lot longer. I know it sounds really basic, but the days are very long. You do take after take of multiple angles. You’ve got constant people messing with your hair, making sure the lighting works. And all of that is stuff I deeply don’t care about."
That's why he's drawn to projects like 2018's Academy Award-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, where he played an overweight, lazy, wise-cracking Peter Parker, and, his latest project, Hoops, on Netflix, where he plays an outrageously vulgar and always short-tempered high school basketball coach; both are animated. Animation, he says, cuts a lot of that "extra" acting stuff out.
He doesn't mind acting all the time. In the time since Spider-Verse and New Girl, and before Hoops, Johnson's had a few different irons on the fire. Earlier this year, he appeared in the very best episode of Rob McElhenney's new show Mythic Quest. Last fall, he took on a starring role in Stumptown, playing a bartender once again, albeit this time one with a mysterious criminal past. Right now he's still in Los Angeles, plotting out travel to England, where he'll film Jurassic World: Dominion, one of the first Hollywood blockbusters to resume production since the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down.
But it's unquestionably Spider-Verse that has been Johnson's biggest post-New Girl success, and he's taken some of what he's learned from that experience and put it into Hoops; not only does he voice the show's lead character, but he's also an executive producer. There's one major difference between the two: Spider-Verse, ostensibly, has a purpose, a meaning, a message. Hoops, Johnson says repeatedly, does not.
"What I like about Hoops is that there is no message," he says. "It’s just content. It’s just jokes. And that’s, for me, what I personally found attractive about it. It’s like, junk food. It’s not probably great for your brain, but it might taste really good, and be fun if you like it. I personally think that a project without a message is OK too."
On Spider-Verse, Johnson learned from producers Phil Miller and Chris Lord (21 Jump Street, The Lego Movie) the importance of having voice actors record scenes together in the booth, as opposed to doing it remotely (Miller and Lord are also executive producers on Hoops). As a result, Johnson pushed for the same thing on Hoops, and recorded in person with his cavalcade of comedian co-stars, including Natasha Leggero, Ron Funches, and Rob Riggle. You may not see the difference in recording methods, but you'll almost definitely hear it; even behind animation, the chemistry is noticeable. "You can’t really fake it," Johnson says.
Obviously, Hoops is a cartoon. But still, it's really raunchy. There are jokes at just about everyone's expense (as Johnson describes it, "a lot of drugs, and dick and balls kind of humor"). At some points, things can get dark. Like, cut a horse's head off and put it in a teacher's bed (in homage to The Godfather) dark. And in the hyper-aware social society in which we live today, it's fair to wonder if Johnson was ever concerned about the show potentially crossing whatever line might exist. But he's not worried.
"We were all very conscious of ideally not offending any specific group," he says. "But if you’re offended by vulgarity, then this is not for you. If it was real-life, live-action, would we have cut off a horse’s head? No! Even if it was, like, a fake horse. But it being a cartoon, I think we all felt like there was a certain freedom."
In watching all ten episodes of Hoops (each around 23-25 minutes), I wanted to find some overarching, deeper meaning to pull out. I wanted to look for recurring themes surrounding the constant insecurity and need for validation that Johnson's character, Coach Ben Hopkins has. What should the takeaway be?
"Nothing!" Johnson says, laughing. "I think it’s a really good question. I will say, in terms of my answer, it’s not to be a dick in the response, but it’s more...I don’t think any of those things were stuff we really thought about."
In addition to the main cast, the show also has guest appearances from three of Johnson's New Girl co-stars: Max Greenfield, Hannah Simone, and Damon Wayans, Jr., who all recorded their parts in the booth.
"Honestly, I would’ve liked to have Zooey [Deschanel] and Lamorne [Morris] in it, too," he says, adding that if Hoops gets a second season he's going to try to get them on board again. "I’d consider everybody in that cast to be a friend of mine. We know each other well after working together all those years, and it’s fun working with people you know, and who’s rhythms you know."
When Johnson and creator Ben Hoffman (an old comedy friend of his) made their pilot presentation for Netflix years ago (The same cold open that appears in the show's first episode, when Johnson's character yells at a referee), Johnson had one goal: to make Hoffman laugh. Once the show got picked up to series, he kept that tunnel vision goal: make his friend laugh.
Johnson and Hoffman's shared oddball sense of humor also led to one of Hoops' funniest running jokes: constant, nonstop references to the forgotten Jodie Foster-directed 1991 film Little Man Tate.
"[Hoffman] made a lot of Little Man Tate jokes, and we all thought it was really funny," he said. "And I think it was in writing episode seven, somebody said something, and I admitted that I’ve never seen it. And then somebody else admitted they’d never seen it, and then Ben admitted he had never seen it. And we realized nobody had watched the movie."
It's clear from what he says and the tone in his voice that Johnson really loves animation so much. He's a guy who doesn't care about the frills of being in a movie, or being in a TV show, or any of the glitzy glamour that goes along with it. He just cares about being funny, and making people laugh, and he's now seeing that animation is the most streamlined way to do that.
Obviously, Jake Johnson is never going to completely drop the on-camera portion of his career; he's too charming, charismatic, and fun to watch for that. But it's clear that he's thrilled to know that there's a way he can pull this whole being funny thing off without any of those bells and whistles that he couldn't care less about.
And if Hoops pays off, he'll have proof that he can just be funny without any of the bullshit—not to be a dick about it.
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