Zooey Deschanel (from left), Jake Johnson, Max Greenfield and Lamorne Morris. (
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Jake Johnson casts an inconspicuous figure on the lot at 20th Century Fox in LA. He is standing under an enormous canvas blowup of Julie Andrews in “The Sound of Music,” her arms spread against a backdrop of the Alps. Next door is the “Simpsons”’ soundstage. A huge banner of Homer and company cover the building’s cement facade. Johnson, in sandals, jeans and a T-shirt, looks like might be a crew member of any one of the productions that film here. But he’s one of the stars of “New Girl,” the offbeat Elizabeth Meriwether comedy that films on the same soundstage where Patty Duke tore off Susan Hayward’s wig in “Valley of the Dolls.”
Surrounded by mementoes of such high and low art has given Johnson some perspective. Sitting on a bench in a picnic area just beyond the “Simpsons” soundstage, he reflects on his days as a “grinder” actor, and says that, measured against his life a year ago, he has reason to smile.
“When I come to work, I always get in a good mood because I realize I didn’t audition for pilot season this year,” he says.
Johnson, 33, was handpicked by Meriwether to play Nick Miller, the scruffiest of the male roommates who live with dizzy Jess (Zooey Deschanel). They had worked together on “No Strings Attached,” a rom-com written by Meriwether that starred Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher.
“Liz is the first writer or director who saw me as a potential love interest,” he says. “I’d never seen myself in that kind of part. She’s funny. She’s so smart. Anytime you make any sort of penis joke or any kind of vagina joke, she cannot help but laugh.”
Meriwether says she wanted Johnson on her show because “he’s a real man. I don’t think you see that on TV. With Jake, you don’t feel like you can see the joke coming a mile away. He’s so good at making things natural.”
Johnson is a funny guy who excels at Dude Talk, that particularly inarticulate way young men communicate with each other. He has been able to perfect his command of Dude Talk in the poker rooms that he frequents in downmarket LA suburbs such as Commerce and Inglewood.
That’s where he first learned that dudes like “New Girl” as much as girls.
“I’ve had discussions at these tables with guys who say, ‘Dude, your character and the main girl, you guys are going to get together, for sure.’ And I’ll say, ‘I don’t know.’ And they’ll say, ‘Bulls – – t, dude. That was the set-up from the beginning.’ ”
Meriwether says that Johnson texts her from these games to tell her he’s met another male fan of her show. He’s thrilled that men “care about the romance.”
Or almost romance. Jess and Nick have seen each other naked and shared intimate moments, but the clinch that looked like it was coming didn’t and they dated other people.
“It’s coming back big and strong,” Johnson says. “For the last couple of weeks, I got to work with Zooey a lot. I remembered how much I like it.”
As “New Girl” wraps up its first season, Meriwether won’t say exactly where Nick and Jess are headed. “I love them together, but I want to follow it through and make it real,” she says. “The finale does take place on a desert cliff. That’s as close as we get to a cliffhanger.”
On “New Girl,” Johnson plays a “loser” who “doesn’t know quite who he wants to be. But he knows that he wants to be something.” Nick’s disposition gets him into trouble, and that’s the way Johnson’s life almost turned out. He got a wake-up call when he dropped out of high school at age 15 and had to repeat his entire sophomore year.
“It made me work a lot harder. I got better grades,” he says. “My anxiety dreams to this day are that I’m back in school and I missed a credit — and now I’m 33. And there’s a bunch of people going, ‘This guy’s a real idiot.’”
Still, even when he moved to Hollywood following a broken college romance undertaken while at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Johnson was not convinced he had made the right decision. All he wanted to be was the next Bill Murray, but he was working in casinos, doing improv, comedy bits on stages all over LA and going nowhere fast.
“Once I got out here, in my 20s and I committed to it, I thought it was a very stupid decision,” he says. “And I don’t have a backup plan. I had no other job training. I had no other skill set. I had no other thought.”
But he started booking commercials and indie movies, where Meriwether first spotted him. He also met his wife. Erin Payne is an artist and a painter. She and Johnson have been together seven years and married nine months.
Johnson happily shows off his gold wedding band. For a guy who once lacked direction, he has turned everything around.
For his hiatus, he doesn’t think he’ll do another project. Now that he’s no longer a grinder actor, he can afford to be choosy.
Says Johnson, “I don’t want to take work just to take work. I think I might have a summer where I do weird stuff as a person, not as an actor.”
NEW GIRL
Tuesday, 9 p.m., Fox