At the very start of his career, Jonah Hill met Adam McKay over tacos at a Mexican spot in Hollywood. This was back in 2004, just after Hill appeared in his first movie—I Heart Huckabees. McKay, a former head writer for SNL who was just beginning a streak of comedies that would define the aughts, loved his performance. They riffed for hours.
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Hill would go on to star in his own run of raunchy, coming-of-age comedies that captured a generation. Then he pivoted: first to more serious roles in movies like Moneyball and The Wolf of Wall Street and then to the other side of the camera, directing his coming-of-age skate drama, Mid90s. McKay, too, would go on to more dramatic fare, writing and directing The Big Short and Vice. But until they made Don’t Look Up, a dark comedy about two astronomers trying to warn mankind of impending doom that Netflix will release later this year, the two had somehow never worked together.
“I’ve gotten to work with all these great directors now,” Hill says, “and Adam is one of the ones I’ve wanted to work with forever, and we finally found the right thing.” He’s speaking from his backyard in Malibu amid a riot of greenery, a smoothie and a pack of American Spirits by his side. (McKay Zooms in while lying on his couch at home.) “What I love about Adam,” Hill continues, “is he started in comedy like I did, and he’s directed comedic masterpieces, and then he’s also gone on to direct masterpieces outside of that very specific genre. But he’s still the funniest guy.”
We’ve enlisted McKay to get on the horn with Hill to talk about his career path and the tricky shift from funny guy to Oscar contender. It’s a leap that many have failed to make, and one that expended much of Hill’s industry capital and psychic energy. But at 37, Hill seems to have found his groove, acting in movies like McKay’s and continuing to direct, including a very meta documentary about his therapist.
That film has been its own therapeutic process, and Hill speaks openly and eagerly about his mental health. He looks well too: His hair is blond, he’s wearing a blue-and-purple tie-dyed T-shirt, and he’s got the warmed-over complexion of an everyday surfer, which he’s become over the past couple of years. McKay is immediately heartened by how relaxed his pal looks, and their conversation quickly swells to encompass the power of therapy, the myth of the tortured artist, and the square-dancing movie they’re definitely going to make next. —Sam Schube
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Adam McKay: We should start the interview with how blond you look. Oh, my God. What are you doing with your average day, living out by the beach? I mean, I can’t get over how blond and sun-dappled you look.
Jonah Hill: Thanks, baby. I’m still a workaholic. I still write and direct and get all my projects in order and stuff. But then I also surf every day. I make myself surf every day. I don’t know if dropping out is kind of the accurate word, but I kind of dropped out a little bit. I still love my creativity and my work. But I definitely live a very quiet lifestyle, where I surf, hang with my dog, hang with my nephews. Just keep it mellow.
What time do you surf? Are you doing the thing where you get up at 5 a.m.?
No, I’ll surf at like 7 a.m., and if it’s good again at like 3 or 4 p.m., I’ll take a work break for an hour and surf.
So you’re surfing, working out a little bit in the morning, and then as your day progresses, you’re writing, you’re working on things you’re going to direct.
Yeah. I have my company, Strong Baby Productions, that we started last year. And then I have my three main projects I focus on, which are the next film I’m directing, from something I wrote; then the documentary on our boy [Phil] Stutz, my therapist; and this movie I cowrote with Kenya Barris that he’s going to direct and we’ll shoot in the fall, which is an interracial-marriage comedy.
For my next movie I’m directing, I have to make, like, a straight-up presentation reel for Warner Bros. to present to the committee. You don’t have to deal with this because you’re a super baller, but second-movie people got to literally go in front of the gauntlet and give a presentation reel to get the green light, along with the script and the cast and everything. It’s this big, formal presentation, Succession-style.
But I break everything into weekly chunks. So I’ll do a rewrite on the Kenya movie—that’ll be a week. I’ll have a next round of editing and shooting for Stutz, and that’ll be a week. I did the Stutz doc and Don’t Look Up during COVID, and Don’t Look Up was such a great experience because it was obviously such a weird-ass time for everybody, but you and I got to laugh together. Even if I’m making a heavy-ass movie, I never want to not be funny and fun during the experience of it.
I think that’s something people don’t quite understand, is that you can do serious stuff, but even when you’re doing very serious stuff, you can still laugh. I mean, one of the funniest people I’ve ever talked to is Errol Morris. David Lynch is another guy. Have you ever met David Lynch?
I never have, but I do TM [Transcendental Meditation] and I’m reading his book on TM right now, and it’s amazing.
I love his book. But he’s hilarious.
The two funniest directors I’ve ever…I mean, I would say the obvious ones like Judd [Apatow] and Seth [Rogen] and Evan [Goldberg] and all those hilarious people. But the funniest people that just consistently made me laugh while we were making a movie, and sometimes it would be heavy, were you and Martin Scorsese. If you see that Martin Scorsese is funny as fuck, even while he’s doing a scene where you’re doing some crazy shit or some heavy shit, I’m like, Oh, you can just be a blast no matter what. You can be making Schindler’s List and treat the material very seriously, but the experience doesn’t have to be a nightmare.
I always joke that unless you’re making Apocalypse Now, relax. That’s the one movie where you can lose your shit a little bit. They literally had the Philippine army [loaning them helicopters and pilots]; Martin Sheen had a heart attack. There’s rumors that there were actual dead bodies on the set. You’re allowed to freak out if you’re making Apocalypse Now. Maybe Fitzcarraldo. Those would be the two movies.
Yeah, but the point is you can’t even make Apocalypse Now or Fitzcarraldo now in this modern society. It’s not like you can live it like you did back in the day, and I don’t even think it’s fun to. When I was a younger actor and I would get Moneyball or something, I’d be like, I’m going to walk around as the character for two years. Now I’m like, Fuck that, dude. I just come off as pretentious. It doesn’t help. I take my work seriously. But we should be having fun, and if we’re not, we’re just being miserable for some fake artistic pretentious reason, and I actually don’t think that’s rad.
I think there was this idea, especially in America, that artists have to be miserable. Artists have to be dark.
Dude! You know what the first thing Phil Stutz said to me was? First thing. He said, “You’re not a good artist because you’re fucked up. You’re a good artist in spite of being fucked up.” It’s all a dumb mythology that you’re supposed to be miserable to be talented, and it’s so absurdist. It’s genuinely: I got healthier, my art got better, and I was happier. Straight up. I haven’t seen misery bring better art out of anybody. I just haven’t.
I’m older than you, but for my generation, it was Jim Morrison. It was Jimi Hendrix. It was these people that were literally killing themselves. And then I heard a musician interviewed about Jim Morrison and they’re like, No, when that band started,they were really cool, but then he started drinking so much that they sucked*.* You never hear that part of the story, that they were young guys who were exciting and cool, and then he started drinking a gallon of gin a day and he became insufferable.
He couldn’t show up. He literally couldn’t show up to the fucking thing and do his job. I think the biggest generational difference I can throw out there is between how John Belushi’s death was perceived and how Chris Farley’s death was perceived. When I was a kid and I heard about John Belushi dying, it was romanticized, like, “Yeah, dude, he was punk rock and he died from heroin,” and all this shit. And then when I was 13 or 14, I lost Chris Farley, and the shit wasn’t sexy or romanticized. It was just sad. I cried for a fucking week when Chris Farley died, and it wasn’t like I was like, “How punk is that, dude?” It was like, “What the fuck? This sucks.”
He hosted SNL about two months before he died. He was clearly really struggling, but he was such a sweetheart, he still had this big, loving, eager-to-please heart. And I had the same reaction. What you really see is, this was someone who was in a lot of pain and trying desperately to deal with it. And you’re right. The way that hit was nothing but sad. Everyone was just like, We lost someone who was giving us a ton of joy, and he should have had joy.
He should have had joy. That breaks my heart. So when you ask me what I do, I’m like, Work shit comes easy to me. I love work. I love being creative. I want to be happy. I literally want to be happy. That is the mission of my life, that I work hard at.
Can you talk a little bit about this shift? What was it like when you were coming up and you were doing the big hit comedies? I guess, first off, just to give this some sort of frame, do you remember the first time we ever met?
I remember when we met, because Seth Rogen lived in an apartment behind Canter’s [Deli, in Los Angeles], and then Seth was the first one to start making paper. And so he got a house, and then I moved into his apartment behind Canter’s. There was a taco shop around the corner, and you and Will Ferrell were eating tacos. It must’ve been right before or after Superbad came out, but I remember that you guys wanted to talk to me. And I sat down and talked to you guys. And you guys were, like, talking to me. And I was like, This is the sickest! This is it! I get to talk to these people I’m obsessed with.
It was before Superbad. I think I had seen you in—correct me if I’m wrong here—I Heart Huckabees. And you were awesome in it. So I knew you were good. I knew everyone liked you. And we were just talking about the tacos, and you were being funny as shit about the tacos. And I’m like, “Anyone who can talk about tacos with joy and humor is okay by me.” So that was the first time that I met you. And then I think shortly after that, you were just on the rocket ship. You were starting to bang out these huge comedies. What was that period of your life like?
It was very overnight for me. Michael Cera and I talk about it all the time. We just had this really rare experience: One day life was one way, and then one day life was a different way. Right after Superbad, I took a writing job on Brüno [with Sacha Baron Cohen]. I was 23, and they asked me to host SNL for the first time. And I didn’t want to leave the writers room. I was like, “Guys, I don’t know what to do.” It was my first job working for Sacha. And Sacha was like, “Dude, you should go host SNL.” To me, having a writing job for Sacha Baron Cohen was as rad as hosting SNL.
I was a kid. I had probably too much power for a young person, and too much autonomy, and not enough life skills. I dropped out of college, and I used to not get why people would go to college. Because if you’re ambitious, why would you spend four years just idling? And then I didn’t realize until I turned 30 that what those four years gave all my friends was this wobbling period of how to be a person. I was really advanced professionally but really behind personally. All my 20s, I wasn’t really looking inward. I was just running toward success. Or trying to find success. And when I was 30, I was like, I’ve always wanted to be a director, but if I don’t get off this train now and write Mid90s, I’m not going to do it. And I hit Pause. I took three or four years to reshape things. I was like, I could just do this for 10 more years and I’m not going to evolve as a person.
And Mid90s, a lot of that’s about how you grew up, right? Isn’t that the scene you came up in?
Well, it’s not literally how I grew up. I am not a representative of skate culture. But the two gnarliest environments are skateboarding and comedy, and I grew up in both of those environments. I was an insecure, overweight kid, which in both of those communities is like having a scarlet letter on you. You are a target for abuse. But also in both of those communities are the smartest, most interesting, most damaged and beautiful people, as we know. They really remind me of each other because they bring in these lost souls that don’t fit anywhere else, and they really are similar. It’s not about skateboarding—it’s just about the animal kingdom, the sense of community and how harsh but ultimately how loyal the people are. That’s how I came of age, and that’s what I wanted to show in my first film. I really wanted to make this movie that expressed the movies I want to make, which are movies that are really funny but have a deeply human sadness to them as well. That’s how I feel. I feel like I’m really funny and I have a deeply rooted human sadness, like we all do. I don’t want to ignore either one. And that’s how I got there.
You’ve gone through the blur that is your 20s, which is a blur for a lot of us, but for you it was cranked up to 110 miles an hour with this insane success and these incredible comedies. And then you take this moment to take a deep breath and exhale. What did that feel like, doing that?
I don’t know if this is obvious to anyone else, but Mid90s is straight-up about self-abuse. The whole movie is the line that Na-Kel Smith says at the end, when he’s like, “You take the hardest hits out of anybody I know. You know you don’t have to do that, right?” I sucked at skateboarding. But I would throw myself down 10 stairs to make my friends laugh, knowing I couldn’t ever do any trick that would be good. Or in comedy, I would be brutal to myself, or allow brutality to me, because I felt like that was my seat at the table. And what making Mid90s did for me personally was make me understand that I can just be a good person and have value and sit at the table. I don’t need some supernatural thing to offer that is beyond just being a good dude. I started seeing Stutz probably four months before principal photography on that movie, so I was already thinking about this stuff. And to me, it was just very therapeutic to watch a kid go through that and maybe at the end of the movie, almost in a fantasy way that I didn’t have, have someone older than him say, “Yo, you’re enough.” That’s how I look at that film and what it’s about.
You mentioned Stutz again. So what year is this, when you start seeing Stutz?
This is 2017, because Joaquin Phoenix and I were making Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, and we became friends during that movie. And then I moved back to L.A. to make Mid90s, and he was like, “Yo, you should go see this guy.” And I did.
For anyone reading this, Jonah sees a therapist named Phil Stutz, and I saw his partner, Barry Michels, for years and years, so we both have that bond with each other. Do you want to explain a little bit who Phil Stutz is and what he means to you?
He invented a set of visualization techniques that greatly changed my life. Netflix let me make a doc on therapy and Phil’s teachings, and then it became about Phil’s life, and then it became about how insane it is that I am making a movie about my therapist, and now it’s become…I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s become very collapsed on itself. The person that I vent to while I’m making a film, I now can’t vent to, because the film is about him, and I can’t let him know it maybe isn’t going to work.
I remember my first therapy session with Barry Michels, walking out and being like, “Holy fucking shit.” No exaggeration—it was like 20 pounds was off my back. I realized I’d been carrying a small wall safe on my right shoulder for absolutely no reason. There’s that movie The Mission, where Robert De Niro carries around a sack. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it. It’s politically a little problematic because it glorifies missionaries, so I don’t know if it’s held up so well—
It glorifies the missionary position?
A lot of it’s about the invention of the missionary position. That’s exactly it. It’s rated NC-17. No, Robert De Niro carries around a sack of armor because he killed his half brother in a jealous rage, and that’s his penance. And then, of course, there’s the moment in the movie where he forgives himself and his armor is cut loose. I’ll never forget seeing Barry Michels and being like, “Holy shit, I just put down a wall safe.” Not to say I put down all the weight, but I put down some of it.
I felt that exact same way. And then what I realized over years of doing this shit seriously is, yes, you learn these things that can cut the emotional weight off immediately. But it takes daily diligence to keep doing it. You can have that experience of like, “Cool, I can drop this thing I have shame around,” but then two weeks later, you still feel that feeling, and you have to use the tools to continue to drop that.
Well, don’t get me wrong—I think I picked up the wall safe about four days later. But Jonah, you’ve got to have a good wall safe. I mean, it was a beautiful wall safe. I’m not going to just leave it there.
And you have valuables that you don’t want to lose! I respect that. Now, mine is more of one of those digital hotel safes, instead of a full Acme Looney Tunes safe. The safe is smaller, but I’m still carrying it around.
You’ve got to be able to put your watch in there, your wallet.
Totally. For real, though, the mission for me, whether it’s Mid90s, or this Stutz doc, or the next film I’m making, what I care about is: I get what it’s like to be somebody who really has a hard time existing, and really has a hard time with their emotions, and all this shit—even the work we did on Don’t Look Up, where I play this completely fucked-up piece of shit, essentially. All this shit I’m doing, I want people to see shit they don’t usually get to see in movies that makes them feel like it’s okay to be themselves. I do this a lot. I did it in The Wolf of Wall Street—I gravitate towards playing the polar opposite of where I’m trying to get to. And I think that’s why you can laugh at it.
The Wolf of Wall Street’s one of my favorite movies of the last five, 10 years. And there’s two things happening in that movie. It’s this glorious release of our base instincts while at the same time being a total cautionary tale. But I think you can do both—you can play Grand Theft Auto, and do horrible, horrible things in Grand Theft Auto so that you don’t go on a subway car and bite someone’s arm.
I think it’s an individual spectrum, though, right? For some people, yes, playing Grand Theft Auto is so they don’t go do that. I think it’s ultimately about knowing yourself. I can’t let too much negative shit in, or I get negative. You produce Succession, which is my favorite show on TV. But I can’t binge-watch Succession, because it’s letting too much negative shit into my brain. It seeps in too deep.
In this world with the pandemic, with social media, with income inequality, with scary temperatures and heat waves and all this stuff going on, you’ve really got to take care of yourself and be gentle with yourself, in a way that I’d never experienced. I feel like in the ’90s, I was more like what you’re describing, where I could fall down a flight of stairs, where I could take a shotgun blast standing and laugh about it. And now it’s like, the world got intense. You’ve got to really breathe and go slow and be loving.
Or maybe you changed and evolved.
No, no, no. That wasn’t it.
Yeah, if I was in my 20s with my comedy friends and I knocked some teeth out, I would think that was rad.
You know that literally happened to me, right? I was in Philadelphia in the early ’90s with a couple of friends, and we’d been out doing stand-up. We’d had some drinks. We were going down a dark side street. And the old Trinity houses in Philly, the stone steps jut out. And I clipped my foot on one of the steps and fell and knocked out my front tooth and chipped the tooth next to it. And we all immediately started laughing. I took the teeth and put them in a cup of milk, because someone said maybe they can put them back on [that way]. And then we went and had some more drinks and laughed and laughed. And the next day I went to the dentist with my teeth. He’s like, “I can’t put these back.” That was life in your 20s as a comic.
And maybe that’s just a function of being in your 20s. But I’m starting to think normal people don’t go through shit like that.
Very good point, Jonah. Even my friends who were in their 20s were like, “That’s fucking crazy.”
That’s my point—where I hear that story, and I have 20 like that, and I’m laughing when you’re telling it to me. But as your friend, I’m like, Maybe people shouldn’t do shit like that. Maybe you could have just had a nice night. For example—the only things I gravitated towards in my youth and 20s were things that were fucked up and raw. And now I’m like, “What is beautiful art that’s not all about feeling broken and beaten down?” I listen to more dance music, ’70s Spargo, Erasure—things that are just more upbeat and positive. And then I’ll listen to a lot of classical music too.
I find this, too, Jonah—I love that classical music is untouched by commercial interest. It’s so old.
Well, sorry, I should stop you right there. I only listen to Skrillex’s remixes of classical music.
Sponsored by Verizon.
Yeah, Mountain Dew presents Skrillex presents classical.
Presents Shostakovich. But I love in this day and age that you can hear something that isn’t owned by a conglomerate, that doesn’t have money on it, it doesn’t have stardom on it.
That’s what I’m thinking about with movies, too, is not chasing shit. What is great without chasing being young and on trend? That’s my energy. I’m 37. Not that I’m old, but I’m not young. I’m not 25. And I don’t chase youth, and I don’t chase trends. I don’t put any new music in movies. Mike Nichols is my favorite director ever. And if you watch Carnal Knowledge, or you watch some of his real bangers, it’s almost like they could have been made 20 years earlier or 20 years later. They’re just not chasing anything. He’s just chasing humanity, essentially. So that’s what I try and do. I’m just chasing humanity.
You know, what I take out of this exchange is that you and I have to do a really profound, honest, emotional square-dancing movie. There’s got to be a beautiful story in the middle of it. Make the least cool story possible.
You know a movie that’s one of my favorite movies and has nothing cool about it? [The Coen brothers’] A Serious Man. It’s one of the best movies ever made, and it’s literally about old Jews in Minnesota. Nothing ill about it. And it’s perfect, because they’re not chasing anything. They’re like, We’re going to fucking tell a story about boring old Jews. And it’s still going to be your favorite movie.
You’re talking about what is cool: trying to do stuff that’s honest, and reflecting real feelings. I think we’re at a really interesting time right now—and a lot of it’s from social media. Social media, as we know, has a lot of really dark stuff too. It can be very toxic.
I have a real theory on this, if you want to hear it. It might be too real for the people, dude. Okay?
All right. What do you got?
So I’m a member of this group called QAnon, right?
Yeah, they’re great. A civic organization.
So, Instagram. Instagram—as I smoke a cigarette—is the cigarettes of this time. It is the biggest killer. It is death. And I fully participate in it, like I smoke cigarettes. Again, it’s a spectrum of what you find healthy. I have to have really limited interaction with it.
I was curious to bring it up because we’re literally—both of us are engaging, technically, in a movie profile piece.
Yeah, because we’re not special, and we’re not evolved above anybody else. We’re just lucky. We’re still playing the same game.
Okay, I’ll be totally real. My neighbor here is 92. His name is Geoff. And he’s the reason I moved to the beach, because I was talking to him one day on the deck—I would have lunch with him once a week on the deck. I said, “What’s the deal, man? You’re the happiest guy I’ve ever seen in my life. Why are you so fucking happy?” And he’s like, “I don’t look around at what anybody else is doing. I just live my life, and I don’t look at what other people are doing.” And he passed away two days ago. And the reason I bring this up is because my hero used to be Mike Nichols, but now my hero is Geoff. Literally, if you said, “Who’s your hero?” I’d say Geoff, because this guy lived happy, not giving a fuck about the stupid rat race, and then died at 92 at the beach.
And so for me, I’m not dissing anybody. I’ll post a selfie on Instagram. I don’t give a fuck. I’m just as hypocritical as everybody else. So the point being is it’s all maybe a work in progress to get towards happiness. But the real truth of it is we’re out here selling a movie. You like me, but you can get lunch with me. You’re doing this to help your movie out. I’m doing this because they asked me to be on the cover of a fashion magazine. And ultimately I think that’s cool. My ego is stroked in some way, so I said yes. And cool! Today I’m playing a different game. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be less self-involved.
These social media things have turned our exchanges into, like, slot machines. But guess what? Slot machines can be pretty fun. I’ve played video poker before! I still cheat and have a cigarette occasionally. You know what I did two days ago? I went through a Del Taco drive-through. You know why? Probably because I saw some ad that made it look way better than it is. And I was like, Fuck it, I’m getting a Del Taco.
This is something that I do. I have two boards in my house. [Hill walks to another room in his house and trains his phone camera on two dry-erase boards.] One is a gratitude list: meditation, surfing, therapy, Josh, Chuck, Dana, Bond, smoothies, creativity, and Fig, my dog. And here’s a positive-actions list: pray, meditate, steam, vitamins, wellness shots, surfing with friends, check in with my buddy Tim. So that is all the shit I’ve written down and done today to be positive and healthy.
And at the same time, I smoked a cigarette and did an interview for the cover of GQ. So I’m all of it, dude. I’m all of it. I’m not perfect. I’m not a monster. I’m all of it, dude. But I’m out here trying.
A version of this story originally appeared in the GQStyle Fall/Winter 2021 issue with the title "SuperGood."
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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Moderated by Sam Schube
Photographs and artwork by Ed Templeton
Styled by George Cortina
Hair by Johnnie Sapong using Leonor Greyl
Skin by Holly Silius using Retrouvé
Tailoring by Susie Kourinian
Set design by Evan Jourden
Produced by Hinoki Group
Special thanks to Ezra Woods at Pretend Plants & Flowers, and to Paradise Cove, Malibu, California
