USA TODAY International Edition
Majors is building an impressive body of work
When sculpting his physique for film projects, Jonathan Majors takes an adage to heart. ● “They say the body is a temple. Well, if you go with the spiritual practice of acting, I believe it is,” says the 33- year- old actor. ● Majors, who stars as real- life Black aviator Jesse Brown in the recent Korean War drama “Devotion” ( streaming now on Paramount+), packed on 10 pounds of muscle to rule as Kang the Conqueror in Marvel’s “Ant- Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” ( in theaters Feb. 17). Then he got bigger and more ripped to co- star alongside Michael B. Jordan as ex- con boxer Damian Anderson in “Creed III” ( March 3) and even bigger to play bodybuilder Killian Maddox in the drama “Magazine Dreams,” which premieres Friday at Sundance Film Festival.
Transforming himself for roles has been part of Majors’ process for the past two years – and is a far cry from being a teenage athlete in Texas or the drama school student who danced, stretched and took yoga classes.
“I enjoy it. There’s so much learning to be done,” Majors says. “We take our bodies for granted. Like our brains, they have capabilities of unknown potential and, within our art form, they are integral to the presentation of the story.”
When he’s running lines to himself while working out, “something will happen. It’s been told to me that I’ll shift and all of a sudden it’s Damian or it’s Kang or it’s Killian that’s hitting it.
“Those characters are real or are trying to become real for a moment and they begin to show up. That’s just a very cool thing to experience.”
Director Peyton Reed reports that Majors would arrive on the “Quan
tumania” set and “do laps around the stage” in his Kang suit. “He was ready with his physicality and the way that sort of manifested, you felt him sort of putting his power on in the morning – like the way you’d put your pants on or put a shirt on.”
With “Magazine Dreams,” becoming a physical specimen is a key aspect of Majors’ character arc: Killian is an amateur bodybuilder who lives with his ailing veteran grandfather, attends courtmandated therapy appointments, and crushes on a cashier while working part- time at a grocery store. But Killian, who struggles to find human connection, is obsessively committed to being a superstar in a hypermasculine, musclebound world, even though he risks permanent damage to his body on the road to realizing that goal.
Majors fosters “an all- encompassing approach,” says “Dreams” writer/ director Elijah Bynum. “By the time the camera is rolling you’re no longer seeing an actor making choices; what you’re witnessing feels like something much closer to spontaneous human behavior.” And what Majors builds with Killian is “truly a sight to behold,” the filmmaker adds. “From the sound of his voice, or the way he chewed his food, to how he’d move his eyes, everything felt organic and true and from a place of character.”
When production began on the film, “I said goodbye to Jonathan and when I called cut on the final shot of the movie, he came back to us, but for those five weeks in between he was somewhere else.”
The next role that will necessitate a body shift: playing hoops icon Dennis Rodman in “48 Hours in Vegas,” about the time Rodman was with the Chicago Bulls and went to Sin City in the middle of the 1998 NBA Finals. Majors bought “proper basketball gear” at a Nike store and feels that everything visual about Rodman is important.
“If you look at Rodman compared to other ball players in his time, he’s quite beautiful. His body is stronger than the other guys,” Majors says. “The more chaos that’s happening outside, the more essentially powerful he begins to look and move.
“I’m quite interested in that, the internal and the external. So stay tuned.”
While specialized training for roles is “the best thing in the world,” Major acknowledges there are headaches. And he’s usually thinking about his next meal. But pushing himself to exhaustion regularly is working out for his well- being.
“Trust me, it’s a good feeling to wake up in the morning and hop right up and be ready to go,” he says. “It’s a good feeling to be on the plane and see somebody struggling with their bag and be like, ‘ Oh, what? No problem.’ ”