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By Jason Diamante
Even though we’re thousands of miles and four time zones away from each other, when we’re planning our talk over Zoom, Jake Johnson emails the following suggestion: “Let’s have a drink and enjoy ourselves.” If you know Johnson’s work— as the self-sabotaging bartender Nick Miller on New Girl, as the voice of the lackadaisical Peter B. Parker in the Spider-Verse films, or as the inspiration behind the idea for the show Drunk History—having a cocktail or two with the guy sounds like the exact right way to go. Johnson has made a career out of playing a very specific sort of good-hearted, well-intentioned, but usually stunted guy that, well, you’d like to have a beer with. So you’re having a drink with Johnson, but you’re also having a drink with the sort of character he plays. Johnson has carved out a niche for himself as one of the best Chicago Guy actors of his generation. He’s typecast himself, and he’s just fine with that.
“People say your characters look similar, and yes; These are the other people I’m obsessed with. They were the other people from my childhood,” he says.
***
Chicago boy is rarely anything, but to be considered a Chicago boy you must meet a certain set of criteria. First of all, you don’t have to be a boy to be one. Joan Cusack, for example, is arguably more of a Chicago boy than her brother John is. It is no longer necessary to live in Chicago (Johnson does not), but it is vital to grow up in Cook County, Illinois, or within a radius of approximately 25 miles. The accessory too. You don’t necessarily have to sound like one of Bill Swerski’s superfans, but your speech deserves to be a variation on the local edition of the Great Lakes speech, complete with vowel adjustments and flat “A”s, maybe a little southerner, if the Great Migration arrived in your family circle. Joe Mantegna, Melissa McCarthy, and talk show host Sherri Shepherd have some wonderful thoughts on this. The Chicago Boy is usually the funniest user in the room, like Hannibal Buress or John Mulaney. He’s the kind of user who is sometimes enjoyed everywhere, even if he lives in a very exclusive place: John C. Reilly is a Chicago boy. Robin Williams was born and raised there until he moved to Detroit at age 12, while Vince Vaughn moved from Minnesota to the Chicago suburbs at age 8 and is also called Chicago Guy. As for the reigning king of the Chicago Guys, it’s simple: Bill Murray. Right behind: Bob Odenkirk, a Chicago boy who played one of the greatest Chicago boys in television history, Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodguy.
But each and every character Johnson plays, in one way or another, is a Chicago boy. There are other people who may play the role of the Southern Guys or the New York City Guys, but it is not clear where they are from in relation to the Mason-Dixon Line, and they might say they are from Brooklyn or the Bronx. . Array, but they are actually from Cherry Hill, New Jersey or Westchester. Some other people might listen to Tim Robinson and think he’s a Chicago guy, but he’s from Detroit. I thought Sarah Sherman was a Chicago kid, since I first heard about her through Chicago friends who knew her from the local comedy scene, and her accessory fooled me, but she’s a Chicago kid. of Long Island. John Candy, Dan Aykroyd and more recently The Bear’s Matty Matheson have been mistaken for the Chicago Guys, but they all hail from Toronto. (Aside from a few supporting cast members and guest stars like Odenkirk and Mulaney, it’s worth noting that none of Mattheson’s co-stars on the set of Chicago The Bear are actually from Chicago. )
Johnson was born in Evanston, a suburb that touches the northernmost point of Chicago. Nick Miller, her character New Girl, was originally from Chicago and the exhibit is full of references to the Bulls and Bears. In the Minx exhibit, it’s not said that his character, a sweet, flashy porn magazine editor who does whatever it takes to get the job done, hails from Chicago. But the guy’s call is Doug Renetti; If you grew up in the Chicago area, you’d swear it’s a call from a guy who had an ad for the lowest mattress costs in all of Cicero on Fox 32. Johnson has noticed that a lot of guys like Nick and Doug are growing up. And he’s had a wonderful career employing his influence on one of the most productive types of men in film and television today.
One of them is his uncle Eddie. “We used to hang neon signs together,” Johnson says. As we talk and drink for over an hour and a half, I feel like I’m sitting at a bar with Johnson and listening to him tell stories of the kind of working-class heroes that used to be more of a fixture in popular culture. He uses the term “guys who ripped cigarettes” no less than five times, and always mentions the popular Chicagoland pilsner, Old Style, instead of saying “beer.”
Uncle Eddie had an influence on Johnson. Maybe it’s not exactly positive, but it’s not negative either. “I dropped out of school for a while and I was running with him and I thought, ‘This is what I’m going to do. But the challenge was that I couldn’t put pressure on other people like him. I’m not that smart about that. I didn’t know how he would sell this weird guy on Clark Street in Rogers Park to give us $800 to put up a sign and we’d walk away with $200 in cash. And he’d smile at us and say, “This is a business, we’re passing by to make a sign. “And I wondered: Do we go back and do this?
In his latest movie, Self-Reliance, which is also Johnson’s directorial debut, he once again plays a guy who lives in L.A., but there isn’t any mention of the Windy City. Still, there are the familiar hallmarks of Johnson characters (lonely, aimless, stuck on a failed relationship), and the movie—which Johnson also wrote and co-produced—does have a very familiar Chicago Guy quality to it. Johnson plays Tommy Walcott, who seems fine being stuck in a rut at his middle-of-the-road office job until he’s offered the very strange (but also somewhat plausible, in our-everything-is-content society) opportunity to participate in a dark-web game show where he can win a million dollars if he survives being hunted by assassins for 30 days.
The problem is that the killers can’t kill him if someone else is around, forcing Johnson’s only man to ask other people to go out with him. According to Johnson, Tommy’s story is one of “massive personal growth. “As undeniable as it sounds, Johnson says, “That’s not how we make videos now. The arc has to be: “Not only has he changed, but he’s running for president. In the end, he is the greatest human being in the world. And you’re like, ‘Okay, though, it’s literally 93 minutes ago. ‘”
Personal growth is exactly how Self-Reliance earns a spot in the Chicago Guy canon. The characters in the best films by Chicago Guy John Hughes all became better people in the end, while John Cusack plays a hitman who finds “a newfound respect for life” in Grosse Point Blank and a manchild record store owner who finally decides to grow up in High Fidelity. Maybe most famously, there’s Bill Murray as weatherman Phil Connors, forced to relive the same day until he gets it right in Groundhog Day, another film written and directed by another Chicago Guy, Harold Ramis. There’s also a bit of non-Chicago Guy Owen Wilson in what Johnson does. He says seeing the 1996 Wes Anderson feature debut Bottle Rocket was a big moment for him. “When I saw Owen, I thought that’s the exact tone that I like: dramatic, comedic, ridiculous. It’s grounded in reality. I feel so sad for him. He’s definitely going to end up in jail. I want to cry for [Wilson’s] Dignan, but he’s also the funniest guy.”
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But before I saw Bottle Rocket in a friend’s basement when I was still a teenager, there were the Chicago Guys. “My family’s story, which I don’t remember, is that my father left when I was two and a half years old. “I was half a year old,” Johnson says. I was born in 1978 and slept poorly. And as my mom says, I was watching TV and rarely watching SNL at the time. And when my father left, I supposedly didn’t grieve, but I didn’t perceive it either. But when John Belushi died and I saw him on the news, my mother said I had a little nervous breakdown when I was 3 years old. I couldn’t help but cry for Belushi. My father’s Hungarian Jew, Belushi, was Albanian. It’s this weird combination of Chicago faces where we all look the same.
There’s something else that comes through in many of Johnson’s more productive characters. The father of his character New Girl, played by the past wonderful Chicago boy, Dennis Farina, a con man who never appears; Tommy’s father in Self Reliance left when Tommy was just a child. Johnson’s story is rarely so different. His own parents divorced when he was 2 years old and Johnson’s mother raised him and his siblings; his father was absent from his life until Johnson was a teenager. But Johnson knew where his father was.
“I owned a Chevrolet dealership on the South Side of Chicago. My brother and I have this great comedic regret: If he’d raised us and stayed in the band, we’d be running the dealership and doing local classified ads for used cars. “He laughs. ” When, after all, we approached my father, we asked him if he dreamed of us guiding him and he said, ‘He’s been there. ‘”Johnson was impressed by this. ” We can just literally been those guys who were like, ‘[with a classic Chicago Guy accent], do you need a Tahoe?Do you need me to take care of you?
***
There are Chicago Guy editors, beyond and present, but in my opinion, essayist and television editor Saguytha Irby is at the top. She’s written a lot about being from the Chicagoland (like Johnson, Irby was also born in Evanston), but it’s the way she writes that unites her with all the Chicago kids I’ve mentioned, especially Johnson. Or they stand out for their adorable self-deprecation in a way that anyone, no matter where they’re from, can relate to. She affects the man more than, say, the classic New York nebbish who has had a subscription to Harper’s since he came out of the womb and speaks of his psychiatrist as a colleague, rather than a doctor who treats him for tendencies. neurotics of him.
I once asked Irby why she thought the Chicago Guy has been such an important part of American culture for so long, but has sort of flown under the radar. She suspects it’s simply because nobody was paying attention to the city since New York City and Los Angeles tend to control the culture, but added, “For the longest time Chicago was synonymous with Da Bears and that whole, uh, vibe.” Irby told me she didn’t want to sound defensive, but as somebody who grew up in a Midwestern city, she saw how people assumed Chicago was “full of fat guys who say ‘jagoff’ (my kryptonite, tbh), and sure maybe the food scene is alright but they don’t have culture like cities on the coasts,” and that it boils down to “ the pervasive idea about the middle west is that we’re all bumbling yokels who don’t know what art is.”
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Feeling this sparks something in you, and Chicagoans, whether they stay in the domain or move to another big city, are known for bringing a resentment that ultimately informs their work: take it or leave it, that’s what I think. I give you. Johnson, in his forties and content with where he is, has mastered Chicago Zen philosophy and the art of not giving a damn. “In terms of what I try to do with what I create, if it means something to a certain organization of people or to a single person, then that’s enough,” he says. “It doesn’t necessarily mean anything to everyone, and I feel like at least for me it’s been replaced. When I started this business, that was not the purpose. The purpose was for everyone to like it. If everyone likes it, it means you did a smart job; If everyone is divided on this, that means you didn’t do it. I don’t really care anymore. Everyone has a different opinion. So if I’m allowed to make this film, part of it is that others wouldn’t like it. Some critics can just kill it and that really hurts me. But what I’ve learned is that we don’t see things the same way, friend.
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