Jake Johnson's Worst Job Was Moving Futons for His Mom

In Early Works, we talk to artists young and old about the jobs and life experiences that led them to their current moment. Today, it's actor, writer, and comedian Jake Johnson, who has a role in the Tom Cruise-led reboot of The Mummy that sees release today. He's also the lead in Joe Swanberg's excellent Win It All, which just hit Netflix recently.

Chicago is a very honest Midwestern city. I grew up with a single mother, so all my uncles were big male role models for me. I was a suburban nerd and they were all cool Chicago guys. Everything about Chicago always seemed very cool, masculine, and strong to me. As I've gotten older, I've realized that it's a really honest, solidly built city that can sustain those winters. When the Cubs won the World Series, I was in Chicago because I went back for Halloween—I've been fortunate enough to know some of the players, too. I was in an Airbnb in Evanston watching the final out with my wife. As a diehard Cubs fan, it was something you'd never expected—like getting to meet Santa Claus. "First of all, I didn't even think it was real—second of all, what?!?" The second city became the first city, for a day.

I had so many jobs as a kid. I didn't start getting paid as an actor until I was 27. I worked as a waiter in a diner in the suburbs, but my mother owned a furniture store, so my real first job was delivering furniture, which I was doing since I was 13 years old. We did that for years. I moved futons for another company too, and did a bunch of construction. Working for my mother was awful. There was no salary, so it was tip-based—and I was her kid, so I was never actually helping the business. But the truth is that I love my mother. She was the rock of our family, and the most important member of our team.

I had a hard time in high school. I never tested well and I don't understand learning when it's just memorization. I learn through experience, not from reading a textbook. I dropped out when I was 15 for a few years and entered the workforce with my uncle Eddie, who used to hang neon signs. I was his gopher boy, and I realized that I did not want that life because that life was hard.

When I went back to school, my friend Bill Bungeroth, who is now the artistic director of Second City in Chicago, was directing a comedy in our high school—an SNL-type show where the students wrote it. He said, "I'm the director. All you have to do is audition." It was the first time I did anything in school where teachers liked me and I wasn't getting in trouble.

I started getting into the world of theatre and realized there was an art form there. I watched Rushmore and thought Bill Murray was the coolest, and I watched SNL and thought Chris Farley was the funniest—but I didn't realize there was actually a career path to doing that work. Then I read David Mamet's plays, and Sam Shepard, and The Zoo Story by Edward Albee, and John Patrick Shanley. All those plays really spoke to me, and I thought, "This is what I'm looking for." I spent the later half of high school going to bookstores and finding old plays—this was pre-internet, where you would have to go to a bookstore if you wanted to read a book.

Then I started writing plays that were basically knockoffs—Jake Johnson's version of a John Patrick Shanley play, only it's way worse and less smart. My Mamet stuff is just a lot of nerds being like, "Fuck off, you fucking asshole." I missed the point, but I definitely got the language right. My first film role was in Mamet's Redbelt—I auditioned and got a call three weeks later saying I got the part. I couldn't believe it. I get to work and David Mamet is there! He couldn't have been a nicer, cooler guy. I did a take he really liked and he ran on set and picked me up. It was just the best for an actor on their first job. He's a great, validating guy.

I'm really interested in this new world of content and media, and how things get out there. Obviously, I'm doing press for The Mummy right now, and this movie's gonna get out—everyone's gonna hear about this. But Win It All was really different. Netflix bought a rough cut, and they didn't care if we went to a festival. They were happy to just put it on their site and do no advertising, because they thought, "We'll put it on the site and people will see it." But I don't know if people have even seen the damn movie! I have a few friends and random people on the street who come up and mention it—but in this new world where you make work, you better really love making it, because who knows how and when people are consuming it.

Win It All is a story about gambling, and gambling means a lot to me. I've been a gambler. I love gambling. I used to work in a casino. It's an addiction that I find so fascinating, because it's not as obvious as alcohol, drugs, or food, where you're like, "That guy drinks too much." We wanted to explore someone who's a good person and has a sickness to him.

Everything Joe Swanberg and I do is a gamble, too. We're financing the movies and doing them without PR teams and studios. We want to learn as much as we can, so we're doing it all ourselves. It's not true indie-indie—I'm that guy from The Mummy. A guy and a girl in South Dakota make a movie, they're true indie, and if they heard me say that, they'd say, "Shut up, dude—you're on New Girl." And they're right to think that! But there's no outside voices. It's Joe and I, and my agent helps us cast sometimes—but there's no money, we shoot in seventeen days.

It's really exciting, and we're going to keep going until we bottom out. The money we make on them, we keep in a separate account for the next one. As long as people want to see things, we're going to keep pushing the model and see what we can make and where it goes. Our goal isn't, "We want to make a movie that turns into The Mummy." We want to see where millennials are watching stuff. It's really fascinating to us.

You see the same players in our films because we're all buddies. But you don't want to be in six indies in Sundance—you know they're not going to make any money, and you gotta play both games. Joe is one of the guys who started this movement, and that's what I love about working with him. I'm a cheesy white guy saying this, but I always love an O.G., and Joe was really first. He was making these movies in his basement years ago. Technology has caught up to a lot of these filmmakers, but Joe's 30 films ahead of everybody. He's the guy whose brain I like to pick.

Every movie we make is a new experiment. Digging For Fire had no story structure—we just wanted to get everyone we could get who would do it and let the story form. The movie worked, but it wasn't my personal favorite. Joe and I had a talk afterwards and I said, "That's not what I want to do in terms of this collaboration. I like movie-movies." So with Win It All, we created a three-act structure but let the actors improvise within the movie. We loved it. For our next movie, we're going even further—a full script, traditional cast and shooting. We hope that each movie we make has a uniquely different feel to it. Maybe when we find the feel we like the most, we'll shake hands and say, "We've had a good run."

I'm going through a weird experience because I'm doing a lot of voiceover work. I'm going to be in the new Spider-Man animated movie from Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who are so talented. The words matter, so I'm having this wild experience where it feels like the purest form of acting I've done in a long time. It has nothing to do with my face or body or any of this other shit that's typically important but I don't really think about. I'm just in a darkened booth with a script and the directors are giving instant feedback, closing their eyes and listening. I'll get out of the booth and have this great feeling. A lot of actors talk about voiceover work and say, "It's the best—30 minutes of work and you're done." That's not the experience I'm having. You're in there for five hours, but it's awesome. I'd get out and be lost for a second. Once a take ends, you can go, "Can we go again?" I really enjoy it.

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