Jake Johnson: ‘I like tripping out under hypnosis and rewriting history’

Last year, in those uncertain early days of the pandemic, Jake Johnson feared his movie-making days might be behind him. Apple TV had just passed on a pilot for a Seventies-set sitcom about a cult named Habata that the 43-year-old had hoped to star in, and back before a vaccine had been developed, Hollywood executives told Johnson there was no telling when – or indeed if – full-scale film productions might return. Troubled, Johnson decided to take matters into his own hands. “I called my friend Trent and said: ‘Let’s go make a movie, because we might be done in this business,’” he remembers, speaking over a video call from a trailer on set somewhere in California’s San Fernando Valley. “We said: ‘If this is our last one, let’s just go out and have a ton of fun.’”

Trent is Trent O’Donnell, an Australian director whom Johnson met when he was hired to work on New Girl, the sitcom that first hit screens a decade ago and transformed Johnson from a jobbing bit-part actor into a winning romantic lead. Over the course of the show’s seven-year run, Johnson won the heart of Zooey Deschanel’s Jess, and millions of fans, as Nick Miller, the lovably grumpy bartender who manages to become a successful author despite not being fully convinced he knows how to read.

O’Donnell joined the show as a guest director in its third season but quickly became such an integral part of the crew that Johnson remembers him being on set every day for the following four years. “He and I have spent hundreds of hours together,” he says. “For this movie, we were total partners. We wrote it together, paid for it ourselves and shot the entire movie in 12 days. To do that, we had to fully know how we work together, and all those years of New Girl really gave us that.”

The resulting film, Ride the Eagle, is a smart, heartfelt comedy in which, thanks to the strict pandemic restrictions it was filmed under, actors rarely share the same frame as each other. Johnson plays Leif, a session musician not totally unlike Nick Miller if he had inhaled an ounce of weed. Leif’s mother Honey (Susan Sarandon) abandoned him when he was a child to run off and join a cult named Habata (Johnson was determined to get the fictional group onscreen somehow). When Honey dies, she leaves Leif a conditional will: before he can inherit her picturesque cabin in Yosemite National Park, he has to complete a to-do list filled with tasks she sets for him from beyond the grave via an endearing pre-taped home video.

While working on the script, Johnson realised that he was really writing about the career he still presumed was coming to an end. “Part of why I wanted to make this movie was because I really thought this industry, which I love, was going away,” he says. “The things Honey says to Leif is the stuff that I wanted to say to myself about the business. Like, if you could do it all again, remember to love it, and to try your hardest, and don’t worry about if people like it or don’t like it, just f***ing go for it. All those lessons that you kind of forget about as you’re living.”

Johnson, clearly, is not a man afraid of a little introspection, or indeed even a long, hard stare in the mirror. For the past few years he’s been undertaking regular hypnotherapy sessions to delve deep into his own subconscious. “I really like tripping out and going back in my own past while I’m under hypnosis, and almost rewriting history,” he says. “Because it’s all in my subconscious anyhow, so who knows what’s even real?” He compares the cathartic experience to the powerful psychedelic plant medicine ayahuasca. “Hypnosis is basically the slower version,” he says with a laugh. “With ayahuasca you get it all in 12 hours, you throw up three times, and you go home a different person. With hypnosis, you do it in 45-minute increments and it takes two years!”

That idea of revisiting the past with new eyes crops up time and again in Ride the Eagle. Honey, who didn’t raise her son or connect with him before she died, finds a way to finally bring him into her world in a way she knows he’ll pay attention to. As for Leif, Johnson says his character isn’t just there for the nice house in the wilderness. “The real reason he agrees to go on this journey is because it’s an adventure,” he says. “For me, I can relate to people who want to trip out and go on a weird journey and see where it takes you.”

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Sarandon is so perfectly cast as Honey, the estranged earth mother with cupboards stuffed with bales of grass, that it would be easy to assume the part was written specifically for her. In fact, Sarandon only joined the cast at the last minute after another actor suddenly asked for an exorbitant fee for a day’s shift that would have ended up costing them more than the rest of the movie. “There was a moment where we thought: ‘Oh, no, the film’s not gonna happen,’” recalls Johnson. “Then my agent said: ‘I represent Susan Sarandon and she might do something like this. I love this script.’” His tone turns incredulous. “I honestly laughed. I was like: ‘Sure, if you can get Susan Sarandon?‘ Two or three days later they said: ‘Susan’s in.’ We had a great meeting with her. She’s so unthinkably smart and just fully knew who the character was. She elevated the entire movie.”

As we now know, Johnson’s fears about Hollywood collapsing around his ears ended up being largely unfounded. He’s currently back at work on the set of Ellen Rapoport’s forthcoming HBO Max comedy-drama series Minx, and is sporting a suitably grubby beard to play a smutty magazine publisher who teams up with a young feminist to create the first erotic magazine for women. After being so heavily involved in almost every aspect of Ride the Eagle, Johnson says he’s relishing the chance to just act. “It’s the first time in a while that I’ve really been able to sink my teeth into a character,” he says. “I’m having a true blast.”

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Time will tell if the show will become as beloved as New Girl, which experienced a resurgence in popularity during the pandemic as new viewers discovered the warm-hearted sitcom on streaming platforms and old fans returned to it for some much-needed comfort viewing. As per usual, Prince was well ahead of the curve. An early New Girl super-fan, the purple one made a rare TV acting appearance as a guest on the show’s third season. He told Johnson and Deschanel he was there for one very specific reason. “He really liked the Nick and Jess storyline, and he insisted that he be part of putting them together,” remembers Johnson with a grin. “I think it’s such a cool idea to be a guy like that where he watches a show and then says: ‘I know they would want me on it, and I can make that happen.’ [New Girl creator] Liz Meriwether was like: ‘Whatever Prince wants, we’ll do it.’”

Johnson adds that he’s been moved to hear how many people have discovered the show for the first time in the past 18 months. “During those dark hours it was so nice to hear from people about how the show helped to make their pandemic easier,” he says. “I think that’s really all this business is. I don’t think TV and movies are there for lessons, or for politics. I think it’s just there to make people’s life a little bit more enjoyable.” He’s happy to have been wrong about the industry disappearing, and even happier that he still gets to dress up, tell stories and spread a little joy around. He’s given it a lot of thought, and it’s not a bad way to make a living.

“Especially if you don’t have any other skills,” he says, a self-deprecating grin spreading beneath his nose. “Look, if I could cure a disease, that would be better, but I’m not that guy!”

‘Ride the Eagle’ is available as a digital download now