The ObserverJonathan MajorsInterview‘I knew it would be OK’: Jonathan Majors on his remarkable rise from troubled teen to Hollywood A-lister
Tom LamontAs the emotional and uniquely self-aware actor prepares for global fame, he talks to Tom Lamont about being homeless at 16 and how becoming a young father has shaped himJonathan Majors, an American actor in his early 30s, wakes up on the day of our interview lying next to his nine-year-old daughter. He has some chores to see to before we are due to talk at 9am, including the school run. One wrinkle: his daughter goes to school on the east coast of America and this morning they are on the west coast, in Los Angeles, having just attended the premiere of a Marvel movie called Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, in which Majors stars. Before he has to shake his daughter awake to get her to the airport, he takes a few minutes to himself in the stillness of the early morning. Socks off. Feet on the carpet. “A moment of meditation, then some journalling. I used to call this my ‘monk mode’,” Majors says. He is a talented, distinctive actor, a performer who often takes a character off at unexpected angles, moving diagonally, so to speak, where other performers might go straight. He is equally eccentric in real life. Despite the rush to get his child to the airport in time for afternoon classes, 2,000 miles away, he is inspired by the sight of her sleeping to sit a moment longer and write a poem.
The poem is still flip-flopping about in his head hours later, when we chat. Since getting his daughter on a plane, Majors has also crammed in a gym session (bike then weights), a cold shower, breakfast (oats then chicken-bacon), a cup of tea, as well as some more mild reckonings with the self. “I like getting up early, always have,” says Majors. He believes in the early mornings “the subconscious is more forward than she usually is. I try to focus on what’s going on in there.” The results of these work-outs are obvious when you speak to him. Majors is 6ft 1in, broad, a wall of a dude wearing a bomber jacket and jeans. With this, he is self-aware to a high degree, honest and loquacious about his tough upbringing, perhaps the most emotionally articulate Hollywood actor I’ve yet encountered. When it comes to discussion of one’s hopes and anxieties, Majors says, “You can’t fake the funk. There has to be a certain level of integrity to it.” Otherwise, why bother?
His soulful mornings serve another purpose. Barely known to the general public a few years ago, Majors becomes inexorably more famous with every passing month. His turn as the Marvel villain Kang the Conqueror in Quantumania will be followed by another bad-guy role in the boxing movie, Creed III. He will then play an amateur bodybuilder in a promising indie movie called Magazine Dreams, before he appears in more Marvel movies.Marvel has come to dominate blockbuster cinema, in part by solving the bad-guy problem that has plagued so many action franchises. Instead of conjuring up a succession of flat caricatures, men and women ready to go politely to their deaths after 100 minutes on screen, Marvel introduced a smarter mode of serial storytelling in 2012 that made audiences care about a villain called Thanos. Played with uncommon pathos by Josh Brolin, Thanos hung around for almost a decade’s worth of movies until 2021, and Avengers: Endgame, which became the second highest grossing movie of all time, in part because audiences were so desperate by then to see Brolin’s baddie get his comeuppance.
The gap left behind Brolin has become Majors’ to fill. After this month’s Quantumania, the actor will almost pop up as the time-straddling warlord Kang the Conqueror in a bunch of different Marvel stories before he helms at least one huge Avengers movie in 2025. Between then and now, there’ll be bus-stop posters, viral memes, Super Bowl ads, countless press junkets. My six-year-old son has worn a beloved, haggard Avengers T-shirt for most of his life. He has played with a plastic Josh Brolin until it came apart at the joints. My guess is that soon he’ll be bouncing around the house with a fading decal of Jonathan Majors on his T-shirt, and asking for a Jonathan Majors action figure at Christmas.
I ask the actor, a self-described introvert, if is he ready for all of this. Does he realise what’s coming? That there will soon be no escape?
“That’s where the 4am wake-ups come in,” he says, smiling faintly, perhaps recalling all that he’s crammed in in private since he woke up beside his daughter this morning. “There’s no glory in being an introvert. This isn’t me offering a praise-song to the introvert. But you are what you are… My temperament is my temperament. I’m slow to anxiety, but I’m also slow to excitement and I believe those things go hand-in-hand. I may be wrong, but I know that, for me, if I start getting excited, I also start getting anxious. And at this level, with these stakes, there’s really no time for that.”
Majors is the son of a pastor, Terri. Her influence figures large in his conversational style, which is lyrical, imaginative, forbearing, big on metaphor. His father, Winfred, a quieter personality type, was in the US Air Force. Winfred’s influence on Majors has been a more complicated matter. The family lived in California when Majors was born in 1989, the second child of an eventual three. Later, when the family had moved to Texas, his parents separated. How Majors remembers it, his dad simply vanished from their lives, an abrupt and cruel abandonment. Terri did her best with not very much money, but soon there were evictions, trips to pawn shops, frequent relocations between the suburbs of Dallas. Majors guesses that the itinerant life of an actor appealed to him because of this early rootlessness.
“I would say the absence of my father put in me a drive. My older sister is quite sweet and gentle. We would not have survived if both of us were that way. We also wouldn’t have survived if we were both extremely aggressive and forward [like I was]. I would bark. I would move the whole litter forward. That aspect of me probably comes from my father.”
When I ask Majors how else his parents manifest in him at the age of 33, he says: “The energy for communication is very much my mother. Because of her, I grew up around language.” Majors pauses before moving on to consider his dad. “He was very cool, he took a relaxed position. I get my emotionality and my imagination from him. He’s a wandering, dreaming spirit. How my brain can float around, now, to find my mother’s language? My father would be the vehicle. My mother would be the destination.”
By the time Majors was a young teenager his mother had remarried. Though he has a good relationship with his stepdad, and he credits his maternal uncle and grandpa for stepping in as surrogate fathers, too, these were not easy years for Majors, who believed for a long while that his biological father must surely return to their lives as suddenly as he’d disappeared. Majors got into trouble at school, once initiating a half-real, half-acted fight with Tybalt when he was playing Mercutio in a drama-class rendition of Romeo and Juliet. He shoplifted a bit. He can remember being a gangly teenage “pup”, slowly growing taller, feeling society was coming to view him with greater and graver suspicion.
When Majors was interviewed last year by Sam Fragoso on the US radio show Talk Easy, he described this feeling with such devastating precision, it instantly reshaped my conceit of what it might be like to be a young man of colour in America. “The world knows what the pup will grow into,” Majors said at the time. “And at some point? The world starts to treat you like the threat you will become.”
When I quote this statement back to him, Majors jokes that the words sounds much cleverer in a British accent. Then he becomes thoughtful again, wanting to expand on the original statement. “You know what can happen to a young pup like that? He can develop dignity. Dignity becomes the equaliser. The brighter you can shine, the more you can blind them. The shine of your dignity can completely abolish their aggression.” Majors thinks some more, then he says that sometimes, very occasionally, he can turn himself back into that pup, even amid all the “pomp and circumstance” of his Hollywood life. He recalls an episode on the red carpet at the Sundance film festival, in January, when he felt that a minority journalist was being hurried to finish an interview before their allotted time. “And the young pup in me said, ‘Nope.’ There comes a moment, if I switch over, and I’m not giving it that showboating, if I give people me-without-dignity, when the conversation shifts, the energy shifts. And, respectfully? That’s a super-power.”
If I felt a little more confident then I’d read my poem to you nowHe was 16, sleeping rough in a car, when he fixed his sights on becoming an actor. He had stormed out of the house in anger after an argument. “And as bold and as tough as I felt doing that, my ire cooled. I was there in the car, down and out, it was quite dangerous, extremely dangerous. I kind of stepped out of myself. Sat there with tears in my eyes. And in the quietness, I heard, ‘It’s going to be OK.’ That was a huge shift, a eureka moment. It was the beginning of an internal confidence.” Majors saw himself in future as a working actor, moving around a lot, making use of the swirl of complicated emotions he felt. When he later told Terri that he wanted to try out for college drama programmes, she took out loans to fund trips to far-flung audition rooms. Majors got a place at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and later enrolled as a drama grad at Yale.
In between his undergraduate and graduate training, he became a parent himself. “It’s relative, but I was young, I was 22. I’d just come out of college. I was coming from a sheltered institution into the world. And after four months in the world? I was preparing to be a father.” He has a memory of himself, lying next to his daughter’s crib, not long after she was born. “I remember stepping out of the time we were in, which was not so good, and projecting forward to see the beauty of her life, and the type of father I wanted to be.”
Something similar had happened to him when he was sleeping rough in that car, Majors says. There was an intense visualising of better days, real enough to feel almost like time travel. “I think it’s a survival mechanism. I think it’s probably a part of our spiritual makeup. Otherwise you crumple and fall and fail. That wasn’t an option for me.”
The fact that he has been a father for the entirety of his acting career (which formally began in 2017 with a TV drama about the gay rights movement, When We Rise) has surely influenced his style as a performer. Majors often invests the adult characters he plays with child-like characteristics. He landed a lead role in Spike Lee’s 2020 war movie Da 5 Bloods without a formal audition, but after Lee showed Majors a short film he was working on about US border migrants. Majors, watching Lee’s footage, wept like a kid. In the coming Creed movie, he plays a 30-year-old boxer, just released from jail after his incarceration when he was a teenager. Creed’s director of photography lingers in closeup after closeup on Majors’s face, capturing his twitches, the imperfections of his smile, the panic behind his eyes, as the actor expertly expresses a lost boy inside an outwardly composed man.
Though it was Da Five Bloods that established Majors as an actor worthy of serious notice and the HBO series Lovecraft Country earned him an admiring following, I’d argue it was his astonishing cameo in the last episode of a Marvel TV show called Loki that announced him to the world as a star. Over several hours of programming in 2021, Loki inched towards the reveal of someone, an arriving villain for the Marvel universe who would sustain this franchise through years of new stories. In the hands of any number of more conventional actors, there could only have been anti-climax after such a build. (There was even a slow-opening door for Majors to wait behind before he debuted.) In fact, he was sensational. I won’t have been the only viewer who thought, “Who’s this guy?” – immediately replaying the episode to relish the Gielgud-like leaps in vocal tone, all that unexpected slouching and fidgeting, all of Majors’s counter-intuitive decisions that made his character seem both innocent and timeless.
Majors felt abandoned by his father as a young man, though in recent years, since the pandemic prompted a phone conversation, there has been a form of reconciliation. Majors doesn’t talk about the specifics of his relationship with his daughter’s mother, but it’s implicit in his conversation that they are able to be harmonious co-parents at least. His dual occupations as parent and performer seem to live very close together in his mind. “The art that’s being made, the child that’s being raised, these are communal blisses that I’m a part of, and they make me happy,” he says to me at one point.
He’s so good at talking about this stuff, so in tune with his own emotional state, that after an hour I have to ask Majors, what are the costs? What are the disadvantages of being sensitive to this degree? The question seems to trouble him. He recalls a line from a play he was in as a student, August Wilson’s Fences: “You’ve got to take the crookeds with the straights.” These are words that often come to mind, Majors says, when he’s weighing the advantages and disadvantages of being emotionally raw. “On the one side, you feel present, you feel like you’re participating and contributing. On the other side, you wonder if anyone else is feeling what you’re feeling at the rate you’re feeling it. Bro, I’ll speak straight to it. I feel extremely lonely sometimes. I feel extremely isolated in my thoughts and in my feelings. That’s the cost of it. But I also think I’ve learned a great deal about myself over time.”
Having a daughter helps. We realise that we both became fathers to girls at the same time, and we’re in agreement, the job hasn’t got easier over time, nor have its satisfactions become any less intense. “Hoo!” Majors shrieks, vocalising the way the love for one’s child can actually hurt. He shakes his hands as if he’s touched something hot, going on to describe fatherhood beautifully, strangely, as a million little “confrontations” with love. “The trouble they can get into is greater at this age. But at the same time, you have to trust their instruments more. You have to sit back, tell them, ‘Go ahead.’” He says he feels all the old instincts to protect and correct his daughter, how he did when she was smaller. “And it takes all your tenderness to confront those instincts and decide, no. Because you’re not leading them any more. It’s an ushering. You’re saying to them: ‘I’m here with you.’”
For a long time, he says, “my daughter has understood light and dark. She has understood good and bad. Now? She’s starting to understand grey. I can’t always imagine what’s going on in her head. But I’m here for it.” This is one of the things he appreciates most about being a father, he says – the way it forces him to anticipate what might be coming next, or how “it puts my eyes to the hills,” to borrow his lovely phrase. Majors explains that when he woke up on the morning of our interview, with his daughter lying in the bed beside him, the idea for that poem sprang into his mind almost whole. He hopes to publish a book of his poetry in time, and the one he started writing this morning needs more work before it’s ready. “If I felt more confident I’d read it to you. But these are the beats. It’s about how children renew us and give us aspirations. It’s about the weight of fatherhood and the lightness a child can give.”
The inspiration for the poem was literal, he adds. Because of the way their bodies were displacing the mattress, Majors woke from sleep looking up at his daughter. It was as though, by being near her, he raised her higher. Majors thought to himself: yeah, that makes sense.
Stylist Alexander-Julian Gibbson; stylist’s assistant Parker Harwood; photographer’s assistants Bryon Nickelberry and Dominique Ellis; digital technician Raymond Alva; production Kylie Govinchuck.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is in cinemas now, and Creed III is out on Friday 3 March
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