There’s a nice vision I have of a young Jake Johnson in my head. He’s just made his way out to L.A. after a long road from the Chicagoland suburbs to college in Iowa and then to Manhattan, where he did the whole New York actor thing—acceptance into the Dramatic Writing Department at NYU’s Tisch, off-Broadway plays, sketch comedy, writing his own stuff—and he’s got the top down on his new Lexus. He’s not one of those guys that mention the specific model and the color because that’s not the point to him. He just says it was a “cool hardtop convertible,” and that’s all that matters. It was perfect. He tells me this and I can see the smile on his face as he remembers that little window when he was on his way. “And then, six months later, my wife got pregnant and I turned into an SUV guy and my dream changed.”
That progression feels a lot like something you could see a Jake Johnson character doing. At first glance, it might not look like his latest role as 1970s porn publisher Doug Renetti on HBO Max’s Minx really fits with the lovable, drunk Nick Miller on New Girl, the voice of the washed version of Peter B. Parker in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse or the guy who in real-life is just another dad driving his kids around town in an SUV, reminiscing on his convertible days, but it’s actually the opposite. Johnson has carved out a niche for himself as one of the last of a dying breed of actors, the guy who loves playing the underdog, who is just out in the world doing his own thing. He’s a throwback to a time when Bill Murray could show up on screen and charm Sigourney Weaver and that made total sense, or Rodney Dangerfield played a new-money goofball pissing off the stuck-up W.A.S.P.s at the country club. I tell Johnson that, even though the first season of Minx gives us a little of his character’s backstory, I immediately thought he could be “Doug Renetti from Cicero,” the working-class Chicago neighborhood once known for its large Italian and Czech populations. He works all the angles, has a vaguely ethnic last name, and just wants to make a living. “That is kinda Chicago to me,” Johnson says. “A flawed person who can be both dark and good at the same time, an underdog and a hero.”
The hometown thing is sort of an unavoidable topic in this conversation. I tell Johnson I’m a few years younger than him and we went to different schools just a little down the road from each other, and that’s part of why I’m always going to check out whatever he’s in.He’s both instantly familiar to me, but also he is an actor who wears his hometown on his sleeve the way Rosie Perez is always going to have Brooklyn with her or Matthew McConaughey holds onto his Texas accent even if he’s playing a New York stockbroker guy in The Wolf of Wall St. Johnson brings Chicago with him in every role. And Doug is no different. That’s why Johnson didn’t have to look far for inspiration.
“My uncle, Eddie, who I really thought about a lot for Doug, he was in and outta jail. He was a, like a quote-unquote, shady guy.” The way he talks about this one uncle, in particular, his eyes light up and you can understand the sort of people Johnson appreciates. “He was the best. Every Easter, he would come in with the big jokes. He used to be able to take his front teeth out because he had like a little retainer with teeth, and would scare the crap out of us as kids. I have kids now, and none of us are doing that … that’s so eighties.”
So Doug wasn’t an unfamiliar character to Johnson. But the one thing he had to get used to was the way he dresses. The ‘70s sleaze thing: all gold jewelry, the god-tier patterns on shirts with several buttons undone, collars so big they could stretch from one end of Lake Michigan to the other and, in one truly unforgettable moment, a fur coat. He pulls off every look without even a hint of effort, but a fur coat is no small feat, reserved for the likes of Joe Namath on the sideline or Rick Ross at an awards show. So how does Johnson, a guy who has made a career out of playing a specific sort of everyman schlub, pull off dressing like a 1970s porn magazine magnate with ease? The answer is simply he has a lack of fucks to give when it comes to what he’s wearing.
“I don’t care about clothes,” he admits. “I don’t like the skinny pants look on men. And I don’t like the baggy shorts and then yoga pants and then plus-size shirts. I don’t like men in overly-tight stuff that don’t have the body for it—and I don’t have the body for it.”
Johnson doesn’t want to think about clothes. For him, it’s all about comfort. He repeats the word several times, “Comfort, comfort, comfort, comfort.” He’s got to feel good if he’s going to work. But sooner or later, he says the wardrobe department stops caring and just puts him in a plaid shirt and pants with a looser fit. For Minx, he credits the show’s costume designer, Beth Morgan, “a true genius” whose judgment he’s come to trust, because as Johnson sees it, Morgan does what a great costume person should: really think about the character, the time and place they’re in, but most importantly, who they are. So when she told Johnson he was going to wear a pair of tight leather pants, Johnson put them on and didn’t want to leave his trailer at first. But after pacing around a little, he realized she was right. Jake Johnson wouldn’t wear leather pants, but Doug Renetti would. Knowing he’d protest the fur coat, Morgan texted Johnson at ten the night before showing what he’d be wearing. He kvetched a little, said he wasn’t comfortable, but the next day when he put it on it really opened things up for him. “I knew Doug so much more,” he says.
So how does Johnson feel about his newfound style god status? “I think it’s really funny. People are talking about my fits in this but the last thing I think about is how I look as a character,” he says before returning to his inspiration for his Minx character. He recalls one look in an early episode where he’s wearing a pair of boots with platform heels, the kind smooth rock singers wore on the back of their albums in 1975. When he was handed the outfit he laughed. “I couldn’t imagine my uncle Eddie in heels,” he says before pausing. But he relented and put on the outfit. Suddenly, after all these years of playing countless roles, something clicked, Johnson suddenly understood how the look can change everything. “I thought, wow, there’s a whole new tool in terms of acting that I was too, you know, stubborn to try before.”