For Love and ‘Country’
Acting gave Jonathan Majors a way out of trouble. Now, work like HBO’s ‘Lovecraft Country’ lets him stir some up again
Acting gave Jonathan Majors a way out of trouble and a new kind of courage.
At 4 A.M. on June 24th, Jonathan Majors woke with a stomach flu. So, naturally, he did what any of us would do: Dragged himself out of bed, headed outside in the predawn light, got situated on the basketball court of a nearby park, threw up, and worked out for an hour and a half. Then he threw up again and walked home.
“It’s the ritual,” he says matter-offactly, while alternating sips of a blue energy drink and hot tea a few hours later. “It was rough. But we did it.”
Majors, 30, is Zooming from the sun-dappled courtyard of a pink adobe house in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he’s been quarantined since February. He had flown there to begin production on The Harder They Fall, a Western co-starring Idris Elba. Shortly after he arrived, of course, those plans were put on pause. The delay will likely leave people hungry for more Jonathan Majors, since his most recent projects establish him as one of the most compulsively watchable actors working today.
In Da 5 Bloods (streaming now), Spike Lee’s scathing Vietnam-vet epic, Majors plays David, son to Delroy Lindo’s Paul, a hardheaded Trump supporter suffering from PTSD. Tagging along with his dad’s crew on a return visit to ’Nam, David is alternately puckish with and cowed by his old man, nudging his way into the group dynamic — as Majors does with an esteemed veteran cast — and emerging with an on-the-ground lesson in brotherhood and sacrifice.
Next up is the HBO series Lovecraft Country, co-created by Jordan Peele and debuting August 16th. A mind-bending, genre-blending tour de force, the show plays off of the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, a 1920s pulp author and unrepentant racist. The story follows Majors’ character, Atticus “Tic” Freeman, a Korean War veteran searching for his estranged father in Jim Crow-era America. As crafted by writer and co-creator Misha Green, the series makes bedfellows of the ghouls and ghosts who plague Tic and his crew and the real-life bigots who do the same. The role gives Majors a chance to bring his intense physicality, vulnerability, and intellect fully to bear.
“Atticus is a character who used to be a geek, but then he went to war and became a killer,” says Green. “And when Jonathan came into the room, his presence just embodied all of that.”
Majors had never heard of the author prior to being cast in the series. So he started reading. Sucked into a vivid world of aliens and monsters, he was thoroughly entertained . . . until he realized Lovecraft “hates black people,” as Majors puts it. “I felt betrayed! It was like, ‘Aw, fuck, man, not you too!’ ” Still, he’s not surprised to find racism lurking under every rock, nor does he feel defeated by the fact that a show set in the Fifties resonates in 2020.
“To be mopey about something, that’s a privilege,” he says. “I did not grow up with that. Atticus did not grow up with that. So, he gets active. He begins to rage against the machine. So it made me excited when I saw the parallels. I’m gonna put something into the world that corresponds with a horrific system that plagues my day-to-day life. And I get to do something about it, for 10 episodes. Oh, it’s on. Because we get to win. We’re gonna stick it to ’em.”
The part showcases the ferocious willpower that infuses all of Majors’ work — the sense that his body is a dam working to contain a rush of feeling. It is a lever that he commands with precision. Just watch the wrenching moment in Episode One when a sadistic small-town sheriff forces Tic to ask permission to make a U-turn.
Discipline is a bit of a theme with Majors, a military brat whose mother was a pastor. But the emotional control he exerts in his work was hardwon. While some of Majors’ childhood in Texas sounds idyllic — roaming his grandparents’ farm with his older sister and younger brother, reading books on top of the chicken incubator, trying to commune with the cows — there was turmoil, too. The family was poor, and his father left them when Majors was about five, planting seeds of chaos that would bloom in his adolescence. He got into boxing, but it wasn’t always the best match with what he calls the “curse” of being highly sensitive. At 13, Majors was arrested for shoplifting — he stole Christmas presents for his family from Kohl’s — and a couple of months later, assault, after a classmate teased him about his arrest and his AWOL dad.
“It was a perfect storm,” Majors says. “The teacher asked me a ques
“A horrific system plagues my life, and I get to do something about it for 10 episodes. Oh, it’s on. We’re gonna stick it to ’em.”
tion, I told him, ‘I don’t know the answer, man. Not today. It’s a bad time.’ My punkass classmate said something, I got up, and I popped him. Teacher intervened, popped the teacher. That put me on an alternative route. And thank God it did.”
He was sent to a juvenile detention program, where an intuitive teacher, recognizing that Majors needed an outlet, walked him into an advanced theater class. In acting, Majors says, he found a place to channel “all that athleticism and energy and anger — and love! Because that’s what happened. I did what I was doing because I loved my mom and siblings and wanted to do something for ’em. It straightened me out. Straightened me out good.”
From there, it was onto the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and then, after a year off during which he became a father to a little girl, the Yale School of Drama. He was still finishing up school when Dustin Lance Black cast him in the 2017 ABC miniseries about the modern LGBTQ movement, When We Rise. A year later, he made the most of his role as a preening, Detroit gangster in the Eighties drugscene biopic White Boy Rick. But it was with 2019’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco, an elegiac portrait of friendship set against the backdrop of gentrification, that he announced himself, in a performance both deeply sensitive and quirkily offbeat.
Majors is never done working out the personal through the professional. “Art is my therapy,” he says. “That’s why acting is the best job in the world — because you can learn to be a better dad, a better lover, a better friend.”
With his most recent projects, he’s tended to early wounds. In Bloods, David has to chase his distant father halfway around the world to bond with him. In Lovecraft, Tic’s father, Montrose, is an alcoholic who holds secrets and flies into rages — and didn’t once write while his son was away at war. Both parts sank into Majors’ blood, changing the alchemy ever so slightly, opening him up to the idea of communication with his own dad.
“Ben Kingsley once said, ‘When you’re on a film set, you’re a hunter.’ Everybody’s hunting for the scene,” Majors says. “I’ve applied that to my life. And [in] the hunt I’ve had to get closer to my father, to understand him, to understand myself, why I was so angry, why I’m still a little angry and hurt, Atticus and David have given me tools. And now I have enough courage, some days, to stand there, like the boy you are, always, with your father, and ask the question, and hear the answer, and have enough strength to hold back the dogs of havoc. And just listen.”