'Pinocchio' Star Joseph Gordon-Levitt Answers the Age-Old Question: 'What Does It Mean to Be a Real Boy?'

"I love the moral of the story, which is all about telling the truth."

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the star of movies including Looper, The Dark Knight Rises and The Walk, plus TV’s Super Pumped, Mr. Corman and 3rd Rock From the Sun, is heard but not seen in the live-action remake of the timeless classic Pinocchio (Sept. 8 on Disney+). Gordon-Levitt, 41, voices Jiminy Cricket, Pinocchio’s insect adviser, in the fanciful story of the puppet who yearns to become a real boy. Tom Hanks plays Geppetto, Pinocchio’s creator, and Cynthia Erivo is the Blue Fairy.

Related: Disney Reveals First-Look at Tom Hanks in Live-Action Pinocchio Movie

What is it about the Pinocchio story that still makes it relevant?

I love the moral of the story, which is all about telling the truth. The image of your nose getting long when you lie is one of the most transcendent images in popular culture, and telling the truth versus lying is perhaps more important now than ever before in history.

What was your take on your character, Jiminy Cricket?

Director Robert Zemeckis came up with a quintessential kernel of plain-worded wisdom. He said, “If you were telling the story to your kids and doing the voices, how would you do it?” And that's what we went with. So I sound like a dad who's a fan of the old Jiminy Cricket, telling the story to his kids and doing the voices like a goofy dad does.

What does it mean to be a real boy?

The protagonist starts as a puppet. A puppet is somebody who just does what the master says and doesn’t have any of their own free will. To be a real boy, you have the freedom, you have the agency, you have free will. You’re not just a puppet attached to strings. And, of course, with free will comes responsibility to do the right thing. That’s where the question of conscience comes in, to decide whether you’re going to tell the truth or not tell the truth, to do things that are considerate of others or to be selfish. The Pinocchio story is about his journey and figuring out how to be a good person, a real boy, a fairy-tale way of saying how to be a good person and do the right thing and take responsibility for your actions, tell the truth and not succumb to your animal instincts. Don’t become a donkey and don’t just be a puppet, be a person.

Jiminy Cricket serves as Pinocchio’s conscience. What’s your “conscious” in real life?

I guess there’s always a balance between my own conscience and what other people would think. And, of course, those two things, in actuality, are very difficult to parse, because what forms my own conscience has everything to do with the people who I care about, who’ve taught me how to be me, starting with my parents and my brother and all the way down to a whole litany of wonderful friends and mentors that I’ve had throughout my life, and currently my own family. I have great respect for the moral compass of my life partner and wife. And I also think a lot about setting an example for my kids.

In the 1940 Disney movie, Jiminy had some of the best songs: “When You Wish Upon a Star” and “Give a Little Whistle.” What will you be singing in this?

I’m going to leave that unanswered for now.

Your kids are young enough to enjoy Disney films. What are some of your favorites to watch with them?

We love Encanto. My kids love Encanto, I love Encanto. When I talk about great movies of recent times, Encanto is at the top of my list. I sometimes get written off as being, “Oh, it’s because you’re a dad, you’re just watching kids’ movies,” but I would put Encanto toe to toe with any movie for kids or for adults of recent times. Encanto has so many layers, such depth, such heart, such wit. It's a truly brilliant movie. I firmly, firmly believe that Encanto is a very special film.

Why did you want to play Travis Kalanick in Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber?

Complexity is what makes for a really inspiring role to play as an actor, because that's human. No humans are perfect heroes or perfect villains. All humans are complicated. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, and too often it's easier to tell the story about characters that are simplistic, one note. They're either heroes or their villains, or even if they do have some strengths and weaknesses, it's just one or two; simple characters. I thought Super Pumped really went into a lot of complexity about who this human being was.

What is the takeaway of the Super Pumped story?

So, to me, Super Pumped is about more than Travis Kalanick or Uber. It's about the larger system of how our economy works and how our culture works. It's easy to villainize a successful CEO like Travis, but I think the truth is that even though Travis was extremely good at playing the game, he didn't make up the rules of that game, and the rules of our game right now go, “Maximize profits at all costs.”

That's what you have to do. If you don't do that, you fail. You're expected to grow, grow, grow at extreme rates. There's lots of reasons for this: how the economy is set up, the ecosystem of investment money and startups and the stock market, and all these factors, the laws, the way regulation works or really doesn't work. All of that plays into this game that CEOs are saddled with, that you have to do anything it takes to make your company grow at these rocket-ship rates and speeds.

I think as long as those are the rules of the game, companies are going to keep behaving this way, whether it's Uber or Facebook or Walmart or Wells Fargo. Point to any massively successful company that you take issue with, and you say, “Why are you doing this? Why are you behaving in this immoral way? Why are you stepping on people just to turn a profit?” And again, I think it's easy to point fingers at the CEOs in charge, the powerful people in charge of the companies. And it's not to say that they don't bear some responsibility, but I think they're also in a trap because if they don't do it, someone else will. Again, the way that the whole system is set up, you have to do that to succeed. And this is the change that needs to happen.

I would hope that Super Pumped would call attention to this question of why do CEOs have to do this? Why are they placed in this situation where they feel forced, they feel trapped into making these ethically questionable decisions? How would we have to change? Not only in terms of our workings of our economy and our government, but also change in terms of our culture and what we reward and what we glorify, how we have to change in order to stop this bad behavior. I don't think it's as easy as shaming a few powerful people. It's actually a much harder problem to solve. It’s more deep-seated and systemic.

You began acting at an early age, so you have had to deal with fame for a while, especially after 3rd Rock From the Sun. Did playing Travis teach you anything new about how to deal with the end results of fame?

One of the great Zappos 10 Core Values [“guiding principles” of the mega-successful shoe company] comes to mind. Number 10 is to be humble. So that question reminds me of that: Be humble.

People still watch 3rd Rock From the Sun. What keeps it from aging?

Even though the camera work is the classic four-camera filmed before a live audience, and it doesn't have any of the snazzy filmmaking that a lot of shows nowadays do, it has great writing and the energetic performance of John Lithgow. Audiences love watching such an incredible performer as him.

What's next for you?

I've just finished acting in a couple of indie movies [Providence and White Night]. I've done a bunch of smaller movies over the course of my career, and I always love that milieu of filmmaking. I haven't done it in a few years. It’s quite different from being on an Apple TV+ series, or a Showtime series, or a Disney feature animation movie like Pinocchio, or Super Pumped or Mr. Corman. But I think these movies are going to be really great, and I got to do a couple of very different and very specific characters and performances I'm really excited about, but I don't know when those are coming out yet.

Also, my [music] company HitRecord just joined MasterClass. What I've always done on HitRecord is do our best to try to help people find their creativity and doing that in the context of MasterClass has been really exciting. We just started working with their team, and there's a bunch of projects afoot that I'm really excited about. None of them are ready to talk about in the press, but it's been very exciting to see something as successful as MasterClass branching out and expanding its horizons, and to be a part of that, has been really exciting.

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