It feels very natural to sit across from John Krasinski.
At 25, he was plucked from obscurity to play Jim Halpert in “The Office,” and for the next eight years, we watched Jim (and John) talk to us. It’s not unusual for fans to convince themselves they know celebrities, but there was something different about the bond to Krasinski. We learned his laugh, his facial expressions, his inflections—he became impossibly familiar. When it came time to interview him, it strangely felt like the continuation of a conversation that had been happening for a long time.
Of course, that’s an illusion. Krasinski is not Jim Halpert—a fact that he has proven in recent years with acting roles, screenplays and directorial efforts. His latest endeavor, “The Hollars,” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and opens in theaters Friday. It’s a story about a man coming home, but more importantly to Krasinski, it’s about a family reconnecting.
“My family is 180 degrees different than this family. I come from a very loving, well-communicative, well-connected family,” the 36-year-old said. “But at the same time, when I finished the script, I was weeping harder than I’ve ever wept during a script. I’m a crier, so it’s not like a big deal, but I think it’s because what I see in this movie is the connection between the characters. So the open channel of possibility of how much you can get out of your family. And that sounds so esoteric and heady as I’m saying it, but it really is how I feel.”
The Hollars are a dysfunctional family brought back together by their mother’s brain tumor diagnosis. Regrets and resentment abound, and despite Krasinski’s own happy upbringing, he said he recognized a universal quality in the script.
“It’s not true if you say, ‘I don’t care how I was brought up.’ There’s that moment when [Don, his character’s father] says, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you,’ and I say, ‘It doesn’t matter to me.’ That’s a total lie, but it’s called coping. That’s what we do,” Krasinksi said. “I remember somebody just said, ‘I love the movie, if I had a better relationship with my mom, I would have called her.’ And I was like, ‘You still can, that’s the beauty!’ But in his head, he’s probably thinking about some weird fight they had at Christmas.”
The character who inspires that sort of wistful thinking is Hollar family matriarch Sally, a formidable presence. While her husband and two sons are flailing because of her health problems, she takes charge and brushes off anxiety. “I like Becca, she’s pushy,” she says of her son’s fiance (played by Anna Kendrick). When he nods a little too emphatically, she adds, “Men need to be pushed.”
It’s a sentiment Krasinski said he agrees with “100 percent.” Though he is a “fully functional, self-inspired” person, it took a push from his wife, Emily Blunt, before he knew that he wanted to direct “The Hollars.” In the minutiae of their everyday life,
Krasinski even admitted his wife sometimes pushes him to be better at time management.
Krasinski sets the scene at home: He’s sitting on the couch, and in walks Blunt.
“What time is the movie?” she asks him.
“4,” he says.
“What time is it now?”
“4:15.”
“And she’s like, ‘What is going on? On what planet do you think we’re going to make this movie?’ And I build in oh, there’s 10 minutes of previews and it’s going to be fine,” Krasinski said. “I think she still to this day can’t understand how I can possibly live like that.”
Krasinski and Blunt are now raising their own family together (Hazel is 2 and Violet is 2 months old), and the script for “The Hollars” came into Krasinski’s life as he faced the precipice of fatherhood. His character, John, is also about to become a father and is desperately afraid of failing his future kid, and Krasinski’s own experience popped into the script when he rewrote a scene between John and Becca based on conversations he had with Blunt.
“For me, it wasn’t about was I going to be a failure to the child as a father and like screw things up like bottles and diapers, it was more like, ‘Am I the man that I want to be?'” he said. “I think failure seems harsher for that character more than me, but [there were] certainly strings of that. The idea that I want to be the person that this person can trust and love for the rest of their life, and I’ve got to sort my stuff out before I ask them to sort their stuff out.”
It’s interesting to talk to Krasinski about how he approaches parenthood, considering how fond he is of his own upbringing. When asked what he’s trying to do differently with his own kids, he laughed.
“That is a huge question. Do I have to pay you $170 an hour for this?”
While so many are trying to right the wrongs of their parents, Krasinski just wants to live up to how he was raised. But of course, it’s never that simple.
“It’s about maintaining the way I was brought up—core values—but also things like having to earn your experience,” Krasinski said. “So I certainly will do that thing with my daughter, which is that no matter where we are in our level of success, it’s always got to be that thing of appreciating what you have. So if there’s a toy she wants, I’ll say, ‘Great, how much do you have?’ That’s going to drive my daughter nuts, but those are the things I want to instill in her despite this new world of you get everything you want right when you want it. I don’t know, that’s kind of a weird answer, but it’s kind of about maintaining the values of what I was brought up in but trying to adapt them to a much different world.”
While trying to strike that balance, Krasinski doesn’t shy away from new things, and he isn’t afraid of change. Recently, he was cast as Jack Ryan in the upcoming Amazon series. As someone who got established in network TV, it’s conceivable that Krasinski would be wary of this new age of television. Instead, he insisted “The Office” was really on the cutting edge of TV’s transformation—the show only avoided cancellation because fans were paying for it on iTunes.
“I think it blew everybody’s mind,” he said. “And so they saved our show because there was some weird source of information saying people will actually pay money for something we’re offering them for free. So I guess the beginning of my experience was always with this understanding of new groundbreaking direction, so I’ve been a product of that. I always look forward to it. I love new stuff. I love seeing how all this content comes at us in different ways. I know there’s this huge conversation that we’re being overwhelmed by way too much content, but I think this is the Wild West because it makes you have to write something great, because I now get to choose what I want rather than being told what I want.”
Ultimately, what Krasinksi values most in his career is storytelling. He quotes George Clooney in saying that you can make a bad film from a great script, but you can never make a great film from a bad script. Acting, writing and directing are all avenues that Krasinski has walked, and he won’t be content to stick with just one. Whatever will help him tell the best story—the kind that makes you feel like you know a character that isn’t even real.
@lchval | laurenchval@redeyechicago.com
