BOP Interview: Jonah Hill
By Ryan Mazie
September 21, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com

Does this computer make me look fat?
It was August 2007 when a chubby, curly-haired unknown named Jonah Hill broke out onto the Hollywood scene with the charmingly vulgar teen comedy Superbad. Unlike his other teenage co-stars, Hill followed up the hit with a string of successes (four which cracked over $100 million at the box office) in A-list laughers. So how come almost four years later it seems like Jonah Hill is crashing the Tinseltown circuit once again?

Showcasing a shockingly slender figure and a dramatic performance in the new movie Moneyball, Jonah Hill is once again trying to win over audiences.

“I never imagined that I’d get to do dramas as well as comedies,” said Hill in a roundtable interview at the Four Seasons in Boston, comparing his experiences on the set of Moneyball to a surreal dream. Directed by Bennett Miller (Capote) and scripted by Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) and Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, American Gangster), Moneyball, based on the Michael Lewis book, tells the true story of Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) rebuilding the team to success via numerical calculations. Hill plays Beane’s data whiz kid who applies the Moneyball technique (technically called sabermetrics) to the baseball draft.

Holding his own against Pitt, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Wright, Jonah Hill shouldn’t worry about being accepted by audiences once again, for they should readily welcome his less raucous, more real performance that (don’t worry) still provides some comic relief.

In this interview, Hill talks about re-breaking into Hollywood, the iconic screen duo he and Brad Pitt developed their character relationship on, Wham!, and Pitt’s “prank elves.”

Your character in Moneyball uses a formula to combat the “face for baseball” popularity contest the sport was becoming. Do you think Hollywood has the same problem, where people only see the surface value?

Jonah Hill: I don’t want to name people that aren’t as good looking as other people, but at the end of the day, unfortunately, it is all based on ticket sales. The studios base their decisions on who can get people to come – and that’s it. Amy Pascal, who runs Sony, and the people at Sony are really special in that way. They really, really care about their movies, making films like The Social Network and Moneyball and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which aren’t getting made at other places. They are making cool adult tentpole dramas, if you will, and it is very fking unique and cool. … They make Spider-Man, which will make a ton of money, so they have that luxury, but they care. At the end of the day, any studio head will tell you that they look at a receipt to see how much money you are worth.

So did you see Moneyball to be a comparison to Hollywood as well?

JH: Of course there is a massive comparison with Hollywood and Moneyball. That’s how I saw it. I familiarized myself with the inner workings of baseball and really studied, but the way I saw the character was that this is how my friends and I talk about other actors, directors, and writers. We sit and we analyze them and break them down – here are their weaknesses, here are their strengths. And that’s what [they do in baseball]. But unfortunately, it is just a number.

One of my favorite points in Moneyball is that people have traits that are undervalued. For you as an actor, do you feel as if you have any traits that are undervalued? Or has Moneyball started to expose some of those qualities?

JH: I think that is a really, really strong question. The movie is about underdogs to me and people that are undervalued, like you said. What’s interesting is that how I feel right now is how I felt when Superbad was coming out. With Superbad I was an underdog. I was saying, “Hey, I’m Jonah. I’m in this movie and I would like to make more of these kinds of movies, and I hope you accept me. Watch the movie.” Now it’s not unexpected for me to do a comedy. I’m no longer an underdog within the comedy world, not that I’m good at it or anything, but I made a few of them. Now with this film, I am the underdog again, because I am unexpected and unlikely to be chosen to be in this movie with Brad Pitt and Phillip Seymour Hoffman so I’m saying again, “Hey, I’m Jonah. I’m in this totally different movie that you’ve never seen me in. I would love to make more of these and I hope you accept me again.”

One of the many things that makes the movie work so well is this great dynamic between you and Brad. How did you go about developing that?

JH: We spent a lot of time with each other, which for me was awesome, for him it was probably … whatever (laughs). We had a great time. We rehearsed quite a bit and we just got along. We knew our characters had to really get along so we bonded, hung out, talked a lot about All the President’s Men. It was a big thing Bennett, Brad, and I would talk about, just as far as how the Woodward and Bernstein relationship was with their candor in those scenes when they are figuring out everything, going back and forth, throwing stuff at each other… Brad and I talked about throwing a football back and forth – just understanding that this relationship between us is essential to the film.

I heard that there was an intense prank war between the two of you.

JH: It was more one-sided. He is like the Bobby Fischer of pranks. I consider myself a funny guy, but I am not that great at pranks. They take a lot of time and effort, especially at his level of skill – he’s remarkable.

Can you give an example?

JH: He decided that I was obsessed with the band Wham! He decided this for me. I had no knowledge of their music before working with Brad. I went into my character’s office the first couple of days and there was a big-framed Wham! poster above my desk. Then he started messing with my golf cart, which we all had and would race around the Sony lot together, smash into each other, and cause trouble. He knew how much I loved it … so he started messing with it. I’d come out sometimes and there would be no wheels on it, it was on cinderblocks. I walked out one time and it was completely upside down.

Wow, that is a lot of effort.

JH: I know! But also, he is in there with me shooting a scene, which means that he has secret prank elves that do this while we are working (laughs). One time there was a fake genitalia hanging from my golf cart, and my actual car. Next he put flowers all over my golf cart and then [used a car wrap] to make it bright pink. Then he photo-shopped a photo of me and George Michael together and put it on the hood saying, “Wham!-mobile: Jonah Hill #1 Wham! fan.” The icing on the cake was that he had it engineered somehow that every time I turned on the golf cart, that was now a pink Wham!-mobile, it blasted at full volume “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” any time the engine was on. … So he is pretty committed.