Lovecraft Country's Jonathan Majors: 'Jim Crow America is literally in my DNA'
It takes a big man to talk the entire internet through his extensive skincare regime, using such phrases as “sheabutter-based” and “don’t forget the elbows”. Jonathan Majors is such a man. The 31-year-old actor, whose shirtless 44-second run-through of his toning, misting, rubbing and dabbing routine went viral last month, is currently delivering knockout weekly performances in HBO’s horror drama Lovecraft Country.
Majors plays Atticus Freeman, a Korean war vet who travels through 1950s Jim Crow America, while battling both the sort of monsters that live in the pages of an HP Lovecraft paperback and the sort of racism for which the author has latterly become notorious. The series, based on the novel by Matt Ruff, sees Freeman stumbling through the dark secrets plaguing the town where horror master Lovecraft supposedly based many of his tales.
Majors is big in stature, big in screen presence – and has big plans. His rumoured casting as Kang the Conquerer, a time-travelling Marvel villain of Thanos proportions who has also gone by the names Immortus and Iron Lad, has been all but confirmed. Until then, he’s still one of the good guys, also starring opposite desperado Idris Elba in the Jay-Z-produced western The Harder They Fall.
It is midday in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which has been Majors’ home since he arrived to begin shooting Harder just before the pandemic hit. We speak via video link, Majors sipping a matcha tea. I know, since it’s midday there, that he has already completed a two-hour workout and a spot of meditation with his Tibetan sound bowls. “Yeah,” he confirms. “I go to bed at 10 every night. I wake up at four in the morning every morning. The ritual is really important to me.”
A few years ago, Mark Wahlberg shared a similarly eccentric daily schedule that began with a 2.30am alarm and by 9.30am had him in the thick of some “cryo chamber recovery”, having already played golf. Wahlberg was roundly ridiculed, but Majors’ sense of style, humour and creative purpose somehow make mockery impossible. “We’re trying to be picked by the muses,” he says, smiling. “And it’s better if they know where you’re gonna be!”
The path that led Majors to become an unabashed supplicant of the muses began one Christmas in a Texas department store, where he was shoplifting gifts for his family. The middle child of three, he had spent his early years on the California air force base where his father worked, but by the time Majors was hitting adolescence, his father had left and the family’s money struggles led Majors to begin stealing.
“I hadn’t been busted yet,” he says, “but you always will be – and my time came. You would think that would straighten me out, but it actually just rattled me.” When a classmate made “this slick-ass remark about my father”, a fight broke out and Majors ended up in juvenile detention. “While in there, I met a few people – and the last angel that appeared to me was Ms LJ. She taught theatre arts.” From there, he made it into Yale Drama School, landing his first major role as a gay rights activist in When We Rise, 2017’s eight-part miniseries about the struggle for LGBT rights in the US.
Perhaps Ms LJ recognised what is so in evidence today: Majors’ gift for enthralling an audience. That’s the southerner in him, he says. “The language I was accustomed to was out of the Bible, as my mother is a pastor. I grew up with a long Texan, southern lineage. We conjure with our words.” This background gives him a strong connection to many of his characters. Returning to the 1970s, in When We Rise, took research, he says. “But Jim Crow America did not, because that’s something that is literally in my DNA. We lived on the land that my family sharecropped, you know what I’m saying? As an actor – spiritually, artistically – you allow your ancestors to come through you.”
Majors believes his upbringing helps him to keep his head straight amid all the temptations of success: “My father went his way when I was like nine years old and that does something to a person, you know?” The two are “cordial” now, but it was from this early departure that Majors learnt the importance of self-reliance: “I tell people a lot, ‘My home is really my gut.’ Like, that’s where I feel grounded.”
His gut has steered him towards a string of critically lauded projects, including 2019 film The Last Black Man in San Francisco, actor Jimmie Fails’ semi-autobiographical account of gentrification and alienation in the city of his birth. Majors played Jimmie’s best friend, a socks-and-sandals wearing playwright who is mocked and misunderstood by the local corner boys, but vindicated when he stages a one-man play that speaks to their pain.
In White Boy Rick, Majors played a more stereotypically menacing drug dealer, but he formed a fast friendship with his co-star, fellow Texan Matthew McConaughey. Earlier this year, he starred in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods as David, the eager-to-please son of a MAGA-hat-wearing Vietnam vet. His first scene, in which he gatecrashes his father’s platoon-reunion jungle trek, highlights Majors’ special talent: most actors need a line or two of dialogue to establish character; he does it the instant he moves into the frame.
To be a black man in America, he feels, is to walk down the street with passersby thinking you pose a physical threat. This means you might
carry yourself in a way that defers to the racist anxiety of others. In drama school, Majors was always being told to “expand” himself. “I would kind of sit like this–” he folds his arms across his body and crouches inward “–making myself smaller and covering up my most vulnerable places.”
This awareness of how others are perceiving you can also change your tone of voice, he says, perhaps to disguise where you come from and free yourself from the assumptions people make about that. “I think of James Earl Jones, because one of the things we love about him is his voice. He’s also from the south, but you wouldn’t believe it, if you heard him. When you are such a target, you have to be very clear with your voice.”
Majors starts shrugging rhythmically when he gets on to the subject of Jay-Z, calling the rapper by his nickname as he tells me how they first met on a dancefloor. “Hov comes and it’s the four of us, just groovin’ groovin’ groovin’.” Later, his voice softens when he recalls one of his last chats with Chadwick Boseman, his late castmate in Da 5 Bloods. “Chad’s humility and curiosity,” he says, laying a fist on his chest, “and his big brother nature – you know, I really felt he was seeing me in a different way.”
We talk about the row over black British actors playing African-Americans, recently reignited by Daniel Kaluuya being cast as Fred Hampton, the Black Panther party member who was assassinated in 1969. Majors’ take is typically nuanced, mentioning Detroit, Kathryn Bigelow’s volatile film about the 1967 riots in the city. “John Boyega actually took – not took – won a role I was very close to getting. I did not see that as, ‘A British guy took an American role.’ I saw that as, ‘Another brother won the role.’”
The way forward, he says, is to ditch the “There can only be one” mentality in favour of more diverse storytelling. “Black men are not a monolith, therefore you can’t just write one type. As people are emboldened to write multiple stories, there’s more material.”
Majors’ own film star trajectory seems secure, thanks to that hefty Marvel role, yet his performance in Lovecraft Country is no detour. It’s hard to imagine another role better tapping in to all of his inspirations: the exploration of how the African American past is still very much present, the fraught father-son relationship, the wondrously WTF monster moments, drawn together by an all-action hero who wears his vulnerability on his rolled-up sleeves.
For all these reasons and more Majors is fully on board with the show’s mission to reclaim horror genre territory for black America and beyond. “If you see someone experience fear, it expands their humanity, right? And therein lies the sin of keeping us locked out for so long. We had to be brave and tough all the time. Well, that’s not how everybody is in any group. So if the audiences sees that fear, everybody grows collectively, y’know?” He pauses. “I think that is a huge gift.”
• Lovecraft Country concludes on Sky Atlantic on 19 October.