Caught in two minds
‘Mindhunter’ star Jonathan Groff tells Jane Mulkerrins about playing a ‘serial killer whisperer’.
Jonathan Groff is not, he says, ‘‘a serial killer sort of person’’, which will probably come as a relief to the millions of adoring families who know him best in wholesome animated form, as the voice of mountain-dwelling ice harvester Kristoff in Disney’s Frozen.
What drew the 34-year-old actor – nominated for a Tony for his Broadway performance as Melchior Gabor in Spring Awakening and his scene-stealing turn as King George III in Hamilton – to the dark, murder-heavy Netflix drama Mindhunter was, he says, precisely that it was a radical departure from his previous roles.
His FBI profiler Holden Ford is this ‘‘corn-fed, all-American, earnest Midwestern guy, having an existential crisis, finding meaning and purpose while talking to incarcerated sociopathic murderers’’.
Groff tells me all this, it should be noted, with an enormous grin. Apparently, the only major note that David Fincher, Mindhunter’s director, ever has for his leading man is to stop smiling so much. ‘‘[Fincher] would be like, ‘We’re rolling, and, Jonathan, stop smiling’’.
Television, of course, hardly needs another FBI drama, but what elevates Mindhunter above the procedural is not only Fincher’s precision direction, but the tension inherent in Ford’s mission.
Set in the late 1970s and based on the career of real-life FBI profiler and ‘‘serial killer whisperer’’ John Douglas, ‘‘Holden is pushing for understanding and curiosity, rather than simply dismissing these killers as crazy,’’ says Groff.
Using the emerging social sciences of criminology and psychology, he hopes to gain some understanding of what motivates these apparent monsters.
In the first series Ford interviewed notorious murderers Richard Speck, Ed Kemper and Jerry Brudos. Season two, which debuted on Netflix last month, delves into the Atlanta child murders (in which an estimated 28 children were killed between 1979 and 1981) and sees the protagonist land an interview with ‘‘the rock star of the serial killer world’’ Charles Manson.
There is also the added layer of Ford’s personal development. Over the first season, he grew from a buttoned-up boy scout (literally drinking milk from the bottle in an early episode) into a skilful manipulator of his subjects.
Some critics have gone further and accused him of sociopathy. ‘‘I never saw him as a sociopathic character, but he definitely wants to win,’’ says Groff. I agree about the sociopathy but, I suggest, Ford is perhaps guilty of wielding empathy as a weapon.
‘‘Yeah, I love that – weaponising empathy!’’ Groff cries, excitedly. ‘‘That might be the title of my autobiography.’’
It’s early on a Friday morning in Los Angeles and, despite the unusually anti-social call time, Groff, boyishly handsome and sipping on a Diet Coke, is infectiously bouncy and Tiggerish.
During the filming of Mindhunter, he has, he tells me, been listening to the audiobook of Fosse, Sam Wasson’s bestselling biography of the legendary Broadway choreographer and film director, on which the current show Fosse/Verdon was initially based. After finishing the book, he went back and watched all of Bob Fosse’s films.
‘‘He does such a good job of capturing that drug of being on stage and the sadness that you get when you come off stage,’’ he says. ‘‘The huge rush of performing and the letdown afterwards. I get happy and depressed about it. I don’t want to love it this much, but then I do, but I want also to have perspective.’’
He waves his hands in the air as if to bat away his only apparent torture: loving this job, which he is incredibly good at, a little too much.
Groff grew up in Pennsylvania, in a conservative, Methodist family, but his parents encouraged his theatrical ambitions, driving him several hours each way to audition for musicals in New York City. He won a place in a touring performance of The Sound of Music and deferred his spot at Carnegie Mellon University. At 20, he was cast in Spring Awakening, earning his first Tony nomination at 21, in 2007. Television roles followed in Glee, The Normal
Heart and Looking, the critically acclaimed but short-lived HBO drama about the lives of gay men in San Francisco. His parents, he tells me, ‘‘didn’t watch that one’’.
The openly gay actor is playing straight in
Mindhunter, in a role that features a solid amount
of sex scenes as well as psychosexual content.
Ryan Murphy, his former showrunner at Glee, and the creator of Pose and The People vs OJ
Simpson, was so moved to see this, Groff tells me, that he rang to congratulate him.
‘‘He got really emotional about it, partly, I think, because when he first met me I was still in the closet. Then I came out, owned my identity and, thankfully, still get to play all different kinds of parts. Ryan said, ‘I know that it was something you were scared about, but you worked through your fear, and now here you are, getting to do this amazing show, and not being defined by your sexual orientation’.’’
Did he really worry that if he came out he’d never be given a ‘‘straight’’ role again? ‘‘Totally,’’ Groff cries, slapping his thighs. ‘‘No agents or producers had ever said: ‘Don’t come out of the closet, it will ruin your career’, but it was an unspoken thing.
‘‘And there were no out gay movie stars as examples. But then I fell in love, at 23. And I thought, ‘OK, if I come out, and I only do offBroadway plays for the rest of my life, I am totally happy with that – that’s what I moved to New York for. So maybe I won’t be a romantic lead in a movie – who cares? I would rather be doing cool stuff with people who don’t give a f... than pretend to be someone I am not’.’’
Happily, that couldn’t be further from reality. While filming the second season of Mindhunter in Pittsburgh, he’s been reprising his role as Kristoff for Frozen 2. ‘‘It was the dream,’’ he beams. ‘‘To be able to sit with Charles Manson and then drive to New York to pretend to be in a blizzard, singing a Disney song.’’
He’s never really stopped being Kristoff. ‘‘I make Voice Memos for kids,’’ he reveals. ‘‘I sing for them and do the reindeer voice, which they get really excited about. I do a lot of King George Voice Memos too, actually.’’
He was in Hamilton for only two months in 2015, but made enough of an impact with his campy, knowing performance to earn another Tony nomination. ‘‘It was like being in the eye of the storm,’’ he says. ‘‘I listened to the Bill Gates Desert
Island Discs the other day; he has My Shot from Hamilton as his final song. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s right, I met Bill Gates – he came to the show’. You really can’t take it in.’’
Given his experience in voicing Frozen, one might assume Groff would be a dab hand at recording audiobooks. Not so, he says. When he was asked to record the audio for John Douglas’ latest non-fiction book, The Killer
Across the Table, ‘‘it was SO hard,’’ he says. ‘‘I never made it through one page without f...ing up.’’ It did mean, however, that he finally got to meet the legendary FBI agent in person. ‘‘Getting to meet him was a great moment. He loves the show and even talks about it in the book that I recorded.’’
Mindhunter’s second series launched at a time of renewed obsession with Manson, thanks to the 50th anniversary of the murder of Sharon Tate, and the release of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon
a Time in Hollywood. I ask whether the period that Mindhunter explores, when serial killers began to be studied seriously, was also the moment that they began to be glamorised in popular culture.
‘‘Yes, David and the writers try to address that question. You have Holden, who is a sycophant and obsessed with Manson, and you have the Bill Tench character [Ford’s FBI colleague, played by Holt McCallany], who is like: ‘Dude, these people are disgusting and deplorable.’
‘‘David is uninterested in creating a conversation in which any one person is right and any one person is wrong,’’ says Groff. ‘‘He likes to hold a bunch of different perspectives at the same time. That’s what makes it worth working on, that’s what makes it worth watching.’’
Season 2 of Mindhunter is now streaming on Netflix
‘‘No agents or producers had ever said: ‘Don’t come out of the closet, it will ruin your career’, but it was an unspoken thing.’’
Jonathan Groff