Jonah Hill on his critics: ‘Whatever, man. Scorsese thinks I’m awesome’
Emily Ross For whatever reason, no one around here covered Jonah Hill’s Rolling Stone interview several weeks back. Jonah was interviewed for a cover story including James Franco, Seth Rogen and Danny McBride (it was to promote This Is the End). Seth, Danny and even James played along with the interviewer, joking around and answering questions about farting, masturbating and comedy in general. Jonah did not. Jonah is a super Serious Actor now that he has an Oscar nomination. Jonah is not going to talk about farting. Jonah takes himself seriously, because a Serious Actor is Serious. You can read the full Rolling Stone piece online here – a few choice quotes from the piece:
Jonah on what kind of farter he is: “I’m not answering that dumb question! I’m not that kind of person! Being in a funny movie doesn’t make me have to answer dumb questions. It has nothing to do with who I am.”
How Jonah sees himself: “I’ve done one of the biggest challenges you can do in Hollywood, which is transition from being a comedic actor to being a serious actor, and I’m really prideful of that. I could have made a billion dollars doing every big comedy of the last 10 years and didn’t, in order to form a whole other life for myself. Now I have fulfillment doing both.”
There’s a lot more BS in there, but it’s an old story and you’ve probably already heard it before. Part of the problem was the weird fake-stoner way the piece was written. But part of the problem was that Jonah is simply pretty douchey and full of himself these days. And now we have further evidence – behold, Jonah just spoke to Bullett for an interview, and while the published Bullett piece is flattering, the editors wanted to pass along some interesting, exclusive quotes to Salon – Jonah on his new reputation as a super-serious, self-involved d-bag, and Jonah says that if your name isn’t Martin Scorsese, he really doesn’t care what you have to say. Some highlights:
The roles he passed on: “All I ever wanted to be was, like, regarded,” he says. “A genuine fear of mine was that I was going to be known as ‘The Guy from Superbad’ for the rest of my life.” Around that time, director Todd Phillips approached him to play “any one of the three main parts in The Hangover,” says Hill, who declined the offer, along with another to play Shia LaBeouf ’s sidekick in Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. “They were both really big decisions, and ones that most people didn’t understand,” he says. “I knew I could be a dramatic actor, but I also knew I couldn’t go from Superbad to Schindler’s List.”
On criticism: “You can dis me all you want on a blog, or write whatever you want in this magazine and I’ll just be like, ‘Whatever, man. Scorsese thinks I’m awesome.’ [Laughs.] He hired me and didn’t fire me, so I can kind of not care now. It really did give me personal assurance that I’m doing the right thing and that I’m talented in certain ways because he’s so important to me.”
His relationship status: A bros-before-hoes outlook on love suits Hill, who, though currently single, would eventually like to settle down and have kids. Fame, however, has hindered his ability to meet women. “The idea of celebrity is incredibly seductive and it brings out the evil in people,” says Hill, who used to only date girls with whom he’d gone to high school “because I knew they liked me before I was successful.” He’s confessed to past threesomes and to bedding a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, but he admits, “It’s not sustainable in a way that will give you any real gratification. It won’t have kids with you because it’s just an idea.”
Jonah knows super-famous people: “When Brad [Pitt] and Angie [Jolie] came to my birthday party last year, I think that was pretty shocking to a lot of people because that was at a small bar, but my birthday party this year was at my house and, um, some of the guys from The Wolf of Wall Street came over. My friends weren’t like, ‘Oh my gosh! A famous person’s here.’ More than that, it was the actors there who were like, ‘Man, it’s so awesome how close you are with all these people who don’t give a f–k that you’re in movies or that anyone else is in movies.’ Because no one cared that Leo [DiCaprio] was there.”
The quote about Scorsese, is d-baggy and ridiculous. But the Brangelina quote just made me sad. It made me feel like Jonah was the outcast kid who got bullied and instead of taking that past and turning it into something positive, he just grew into an adult douchebag with a chip on his shoulder. Yeah, it’s nice that Brad Pitt and Angelina came to his birthday party. But why brag about it to Salon? Why put it out there in the public sphere?
Photos courtesy of Bullett, Fame/Flynet and NY Mag.
