Bizarre but honest love letter from dad
Office alumnus Krasinski’s new horror film asks you what you would ‘really’ do for your children
John Krasinski is a helluva nice guy. You can see why people might assume he’s just like his Everyman Jim character on The Office. He isn’t, though. Krasinski — not that you’ll hear it from him — is a bright light in entertainment, an accomplished writer, director and producer as well as actor. His new movie, A Quiet Place, opens Friday. It’s an intelligent thriller that shows off Krasinski’s many talents.
Billed as a horror movie, A Quiet Place stars Krasinski and his reallife wife Emily Blunt as the parents of three kids trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic landscape where the smallest noise means death. Silence rules the family unit and is the key to survival.
But A Quiet Place is also a film about parenthood. That job, with all its fears and joys, is captured here in a terrifying story about sacrifice and the attempt to survive against extraordinary odds.
A Brown grad in theatre arts, Krasinski attended the National Theater Institute in Connecticut and also studied at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He made his film debut in 2002 and was first seen in his breakout role in TV’s The Office in 2005.
Q: A Quiet Place is a horror movie, but isn’t it also a metaphor for parenthood?
A: I’m not a big horror guy. People think this must be a horror movie, and it is, but for me it was much more than that. I’ve always been a big family guy. One of the nicest things Emily (Blunt) ever said to me, when we had kids, was, “You’re such an innate provider. I know we’ll always be taken care of, no matter what, because you have that in you.” And I thought that was so nice. This is me tackling what I feel parenthood really is.
Not that they would ever put it on the poster, but the line that kept going through my head when I was rewriting it was: “What would you really do for your kids?”
Not just putting them in good schools and feeding them or putting a roof over their heads, but what would you REALLY do?
Remember the urban legend of a mom picking up a car because her baby was under it? Where did she get the strength? That stuff always stuck with me — when you’re pushed to
this other side, this non-cognizant version of who we are. Not thinking, doing. I always found that really interesting.
You are all-in here: writer, director, producer and actor. What is A Quiet Place to you?
I’ve never been more proud of anything in my career. This has my DNA all over it. You could make the case that I wanted to make a movie like The Hollars because I have such a great relationship with my mom. And I wanted to do Promised Land
because my dad came from Pittsburgh, and at that time he grew up in a steel-mill family and then the mills went away, so there was an idea of industry. And then this movie is a bizarre, but honest love letter to my kids.
You’ve been on both sides of the TV/movie divide, and you’ll be back on the small screen soon with Jack Ryan. Which is the future?
The Office came on the air right around the time that TV was starting to turn into something bigger
than people thought it was. The Office was seen as a rule-breaker in comedy, certainly more than NBC would acknowledge in the beginning. … Now it’s taken on a life of its own. For me, right now, it’s the Wild West for creatives in the best way, meaning there shouldn’t be a location or place or anything that’s the only place to go for quality.
People have asked me a lot about different outlets for content, and I actually welcome it because it really will be survival of the fittest. If you have an idea that wins, hopefully
it has a better chance, because now people can choose anything they want — they can watch something on Crackle, on HBO, on NBC. To me, it forces everyone to elevate their game. …
But I actually have a theory: by the time my girls are old enough to choose what they watch, I wonder if they’ll even know the difference between movies and television? It’s just about how they’re getting their content.