Jonathan Majors flexes his acting muscle and turns heavyweight
NEW YORK >> The order came before he arrived. French fries and a glass of milk.
Jonathan Majors shortly after slides into a table in the back of the bar at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. On the table he places a small cup off to the side. In his backpack he has pens, a notebook he writes poetry in, a clown nose, the book he’s reading (James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice”) and a speaker for music. He doesn’t go anywhere without Paulo Coelho’s “Warrior of the Light.”
Majors points to the cup. This one he’s had since Yale, where he attended the graduate acting program. It’s one of four he rotates, a symbol of his mother’s longago advice: “Don’t let anyone fill up your cup.” And those things in his backpack? Totems not unlike the lucky stones and sticks he used to gather as a kid, he says, “to keep my frequency where I want it to be.”
There’s much in Majors’ life right now buzzing at a high frequency. In the days prior to meeting a reporter, Majors had been at t he megawatt premiere of “Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”
He was courtside at the NBA slam dunk contest, sitting near Spike Lee. After casting Majors in “Da 5 Bloods,” Lee took to calling him “Morehouse” for his character’s T-shirt. Now, Lee calls him “Big Time.”
“I woke up this morning and thought: I’m very exposed. Everything’s very exposed,” Majors says. “But there’s also a great deal of confidence because it’s like I’m ahead of it. It’s like I’m watching it in slow motion.”
To everyone else, Majors is moving very fast, indeed. After breaking through in 2019’s “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” the 33-year-old Majors has been steadily bulking up as an actor, expanding his formidable screen presence in “Devotion,” “The Harder They Fall” and “Lovecraft Company,” which earned him an Emmy nomination.
But 2023 is the year Majors turns heavyweight.
Majors is the new movies-spanning villain of Marvel-dom: the time-traveling supervillain Kang the Conqueror. He’s Michael B. Jordan’s friend-turned-foe in “Creed III,” which opens Friday in theaters. And in Elijah Bynum’s prize-winning Sundance entry “Magazine Dreams,” Majors — in a performance that could well earn him an Academy Award nomination next year — is an amateur bodybuilder warped by childhood trauma.
Majors’ ascendance, to anyone who’s been watching, is not even a little surprising. The Texas son of a pastor, a Yale School of Drama-trained theater actor, a published poet, a classical and soulful performer, Majors is in a weight class by himself. Uncommonly sensitive as an actor, lyrical and loquacious as a person, Majors, a profound admirer of Sidney Poitier, is a rare and potent combination of serious thespian, thirsted-after hunk and devoted artist. And he’s now stepping into, as Spike said, the big time. Global, magazine-cover fame is rapidly descending.
“Though I’ve not seen the boogeyman, I know it’s out there,” Majors says, smiling. “And I’ve been around to know it’s comin’. I won’t go down my rabbit hole of death, but it’s comin’. But you outrun it. You just stay out of the frame. I’ll stay out of the frame, make my work.”
For each role this year, Majors has physically transformed himself. A diet of six meals a day and intense workouts made him a muscular mass. Yet the eyecatching metamorphosis belies the steadfast interiority of Majors’ performances. Each character — a brawny but tender trio stretching from villain to antihero — is leaden with pain. The discomfort is what attracted him to the roles, especially Killian Maddox of “Magazine Dreams.”
“I was curious if I could actually do that. Not even do it. If I was brave enough to go there for myself,” Majors says. “To feel something that’s inside of all of us, that rage, that awkwardness, that constant heartbreak that I do carry. I can’t hide from it. I have a beautiful daughter. I have a beautiful life. But there’s something inside that’s extremely unsatisfied. Extremely.”
Where Majors’ pain comes from and how it applies to his acting is something you can’t help watching him in “Magazine Dreams” (Searchlight Pictures will release it later this year) or in “Creed III,” in which he plays a man newly freed from prison after a long incarceration for a violent but justifiable crime.
Majors, who has a 9-yearold daughter, grew up poor. His family were at times briefly homeless. His father was absent for most of his life. But putting that ragsto-riches narrative — that frame — around his journey as an actor is something that doesn’t quite fit. Majors has no “insta-trauma,” he says, to fuel him.