When I've done work in Los Angeles and New York, and I've never lived in either of those cities, but I spent a good amount of time in them getting to work. When people found out that I was based in Chicago, they were always kind of gobsmacked. I was like, well, why did they fly your dumbass in here when there's there's so many talented actors here. So there was always like a certain amount of, you know, low key glee that I had kind of beat the odds just by
getting a seat at the table from Chicago. But I also felt like a representative of what the city has to offer. Chicago is lousy with incredibly talented actors. Hi, my name is John Hogan Acker, and I'm just a guy doing acting stuff.
Hi, everybody, I'm so excited to welcome you all to this week's episode of Off the Beat. I am your host, as always, Brian Baumgartner, and I'm also very excited to announce that the incredible John Hoganacher is joining us today. Just like me, John has an extensive theater background, working on productions like Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and one of my dark dark favorites, Killer Joe. He of course, didn't
stop at theater. Since those good old days, he has taken the film and television world by storm, jumping into some very intense and very impressive roles on shows like Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Dope, Sick, and Waco The Aftermath. Now he is here to go deep into his life and his career from his commercial days. Dilly Dilly, anyone to working on Jack Ryan with some guy named John Krasinski. I don't know if you got I have heard of him.
I definitely haven't. All jokes aside, this is a great conversation. So without further idea, John Hoganaker, everybody.
Bubble and squeak. I love it.
Bubble and squeak. I know, bubble and squeak.
I cook, get every mole left over from the night before.
What's up, John, hey man?
How you doing.
I'm great. How are you?
I'm good, I'm good.
I'm sorry.
I'm not wearing the headphones. We tried to figure the whole thing out, and of course it all fell apart. The wheels came off to trolley at the last minute. So here we are.
Listen.
I know exactly what that's like every every day, every day of my life.
It's so nice to talk to you.
I really am such a big fan of yours and what you have been doing here man be hanging out. Yeah, we have a lot of things in common. Some are mostly manufactured by me, but we do have a lot in common. You grew up, I understand in the South, right in Charlotte.
I sure did. In fact, I'm actually in the South now.
Oh, you're right. So you're in the South right now? You live in the South.
Yes, I'm from Charlotte, North Carolina, and a lot of family in the mountains. So I was coming up here a lot as a kid, and we moved back to the Asheville area during the pandemic.
Really, yeah, you do you love it? Oh?
Yeah, oh yeah, I love it so much. A lot of stuff that I needed to kind of take care of. You, needed to be closer to family, and a lot of I don't know if this is the way you're your experience of this, this job being an actor is but a lot of a lot of stuff for me comes down to taping. Anyway. When I was in Chicago, a lot of the jobs that I was winning or that
were filming around the country were from tapes. And you know, when we got deep into the belly of the pandemic, my wife and I were kind of like, I went, let me back up. I went to do Dope sic which filmed in Richmond, and my wife and the kids came out for the month of March and we spent the whole and you know, in the South, it's like the flowers are on the trees in March, it's like
spring everything, you know, the birds are singing. And then uh, we finished and she went back home and the same two feet of snow was on the ground that was there when she left in Chicago, and it was, you know, going to be winter for another couple of months. And she smummed about it. And I was like, well, what if we just went ahead? And what if we just went ahead and did it? Made the move? So it has. It's been wonderful, wonderful change of pace. It's a it's
a gentler rhythm. I feel like when I travel, like I live in a yoga studio and I take that yoga studio with me. People in New York are like, dude, you're so chill.
It is a beautiful area.
There's a little town called Greenville, South Carolina, which is not overly far from you, which I had relatives that lived in green I was in Atlanta and I had relatives that lived in Greenville. When I was a kid, Greenville was nothing. I'm just gonna see, I'm just gonna say it straight out. And now it is a booming, mid size, mid city metropolis with great food and places to go and river walks and it's beautiful.
It's beautiful.
Greenville has that Asheville does not have is a costco. I mean, it's the little thing right we want you. I want six worlds of toilet paper. I'm going to Greenville.
That's right.
Well, And to finish this off, yet another weird connection. I am lying tomorrow this is this is not a joke, and this was not playing. I am flying tomorrow morning to Chicago. I had several weeks ago been in Wyoming and I was like, we're done with the winter. I packed up all my winter coats, I packed up. I'm like, I'm done with the winter. I'm flying. It's we're in late April here, We're definitively in late April, and I'm flying to Chicago tomorrow. The high is going to be
forty on Saturday and Sunday. I can't even believe that this is happening. I mean, I'm gonna have a great time, don't get me wrong, but yes I am.
I can't believe it.
You're getting on that plane under your own steam, brind So you did it to yourself and no, yeah, it's you know the thing on One of the things that I'm proud of myself for is that I every time the weather's beautiful here in Asheville. I don't take like a screenshot of the weather app and send it to
my friends in Chicago, but I fight. That's a daily that's a daily battle that I'm always fighting, right, Yes, you know the dogwood trees are blooming right now, beautiful or so it's going to be like rhododendrons and mountain laurels and yeah, it's just a lovely part of the world.
Do you golf?
Oh yeah, you know what. I've been a golfer my entire life, but you would not know it.
Watching There are great courses. I play a lot of golf. I it's funny when I get homesick for the South. Is the masters being from Georgia, And it's because of what you're talking about it's the azaleas. They got it time perfectly, man, the beginning of April, the azaleas come out the dogwoods and I'm like.
Oh, man, yeah, that is that is really beautiful.
Enough about weather. Well, so another thing you and I have in common. You did the forensics thing. I state and district champion of I was I I was stay champion there two three four years or something there in Georgia. Is that where you started performing or did you have an interest in it and that's what brought you to that?
Well?
You know I did. So. My dad did commercials in Charlotte. He was a life insurance and he did you know, voiceover and television commercials, and he was a real like funny guy. He was a life of the party. And you know, so I looked up to him and I wanted to emulate him. So I got in trouble all the time in school. I was a class clown. And when I was in like fifth and sixth grade, I started doing plays at the children's theater in Charlotte, and
then I got braces. And I had braces for a few years and my dad was like, well, there's no market for a child with braces, So then around early high school. I think I got into debate around like probably sophomore year, because at that point we still had Junior high, you know, which was through nine and then you had ten through twelve for high school. And my debate coach, I don't know, did you compete in like
humorous interp and dramatic intermsmatic? That's right, yes, well cool, yeah, And for the listeners who don't know what Brian and I are talking about, it was like you would basically pick a play or it could be a TV show or it could be a movie. You would do a ten minute cutting and you had to have an introduction somewhere in there. You had to basically keep your feet planted,
but you could play all the characters. And I went after Monty Python because I was like, surely everybody wants to hear my rendition.
And debate.
It's like Monty Python never wins, but knock yourself out, uh, And Monty Python did not win for me. Then I started doing different plays and had a lot of fun with it, and yeah, I got to be it was a state champion two times and I was a district champion two times, so that was a lot of fun.
But that kind of strengthened the audition muscle, probably more than anything else, because then, you know, when I was towards the end of high school, kind of on a lark, I auditioned for the theater school at DePaul University, and you know, I didn't even go for Juilliard because it seemed unattainable, was more expensive the audition process, and Chicago seemed, I don't know, it seemed tamer at the time than New York City. I got in, which was very cool.
The school was a super intense program. Did you do like a theater conservatory or anything like that for college?
I did. I went to SMU in DAWs, Oh.
Yeah, absolutely, solid school.
Yeah.
So the program for us, I don't know. Did you guys have a cut program too? At SMU?
You know, there were no cuts, but people cut themselves. I mean, I think we started out with fifteen actors and you know, by the end, you know, seven.
Or eight, Wow, would make it four years? Yeah, it was.
It was the same same percentage that we lost. They brought in seventy some our first year in ninety five. Then they cut half of us after the first year. They cut the remaining after the second year, and then if you made it past the second cut, you were
in the casting pool for your junior and senior year. Yeah, and so so that the NFL thing, the debate, the forensics thing always helped me when it came time to get in front of you know, a team of producers and a director or something kind of walk in and try and own the room, because I've had been doing that in front of fellow teenagers for you know, three or four years, getting a stink guy from competitors.
You know, that's interesting. I have never truly, I have never made that connection before. But of course you're right, because that experience with you know, three judges and some other a few other people watching, which does you're exactly right, It does mimic that the audition experienced later on there's three or four judges. Yeah, that's very interesting, John, I'd never really thought about that before. But the advantage for having just done it, whether you've done it well or not,
just getting comfortable walking into a small setting. It's much easier to perform I think, in front of a thousand or two thousand people sometimes than those really small rooms.
Right, Oh, yeah, absolutely, you've probably done the black blocks theater thing too in your life. Yes, I had a lot of opportunities to do that in Chicago, a lot of great spaces. There's nothing like that live experience. And as we move into the AI age, I think the craziness is it'll be the theater actors at the end
of the day who are the only ones. But yeah, the ability to kind of go into a room of people and you're all live being, sharing space and you kind of start to cast a spell that whips everybody up. It's a really really amazing thing to get to be a part of.
So you when you go to De Paul, have you decided in your mind that this is what you want to do, that you want to be an actor?
Yeah?
I just was positive that I was going to be. I was going to go to Second City and do the whole thing. I you know, in high school, especially because of the hi thing, I humorous interp the debate thing.
I thought I was going to do stand up. And I had a first year acting teacher that I absolutely revered kind of pulled me aside one day and he was like, you know, John, you remind me of Robin Williams, And I was to me that was like nobody could have said a kinder thing to me and then drop the other, which was to him that was not a compliment, and it crushed me. And the school was very very
hard for me in that regard. It was like, you know, they always talk about when you joined the Marine Corps, boot camp is about stripping away the individual and turning you into this one thing that doesn't really think. You just complete the mission. You're part of a team. And in a very odd way, that was what going to college to be an actor was for me.
You know.
I remember going for the audition and being surrounded by all these kids in leotards doing like vocal warm ups and being like, what the fuck is going? Like, I had no idea. I had no idea. That was why I was sure. I was like, well, I'm not getting in here. So I feel like a lot of my career has been about trying to tap back into some of that fairy dust, you know, that I had in my soul before I came to a theater conservatory.
Right.
I don't know if that even answered your question remotely. No.
Well, one, I don't know either.
But two, that's very very interesting because I think that you know, I mean, I am tremendously grateful for the experience that I had and the training that I have.
But I think that you bring up an interesting.
Point, which, by the way, at least at SMU, the teachers talked about, which is you're learning all of these tools and movement and voice and action and objective and all of those things, and then eventually you are supposed to just let it go and go back and have it be a part of your training, but not what you're focusing on. And I think especially young actors get wrapped up in that process as sort of falling in love with the process, which then you know doesn't enable
you to perform. Yet you mentioned something you talked about boot camp, and I do want to touch on this because this is well unique and by the way, this is not a place we connect. You spent a bit of time at that Naval Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps. Now one, what is this and how old were you? Was this a potential path for you early on?
Man, that was a deep dive, bro, I'm so glad you asked that question. That's really really cool. Yes, it was a potential path for me at one point. So my dad, as I mentioned was selling life insurance. When I was in seventh grade. The group of people that my dad was selling life insurance with dissolved, and to me as a kid, I thought, oh, no, my dad's out of work. I have to secure my own future. And that was, you know, in a way, that was
kind of true for a little while. But at Carmel Junior High where I grew up in Charlotte, in your ninth grade year, you could begin in JROTC. In high school, they have JROTC and it can be you know, typically it's Air Force, Army or Navy. So I believe maybe
there are some Marine Corps schools. But in the eighth grade year, the master sergeant who was in charge of our ninth grade year would bring in a small group of eighth graders that he would kind of train alongside the ninth graders and then they would become the for lack of a better term, the cadet commanders of that ninth grade year when they became ninth graders. So that was me. I went up to Master Sergeant pageant. This guy wore a smoky and had gotten into the Marine
Corps at age seventeen from a very poor background. At Tennessee and parental consent and got to go to Korea as essentially a child. Came back and became a drill instructor at Parris Island, and then became the head of the drill instructor training school at Paras Island. So this guy was like Lee Ermie from Full Metal Jacket.
I mean, he was a.
Real thing, and he was being a super intense character. I learned so much about how to comport yourself in society, how to be a responsible grown up, how to wear a suit, and about decorum. So I started to discern a path to college for myself. But I was also beginning to see the clicks in high school, and I was seeing the ROTC click and seeing myself as being
a part of that clique. And I was beginning to think of it in terms of you know, this is in retrospect, Brian, but it was really a role that I was playing, and I was not ultimately cut out for that. I did not want that to be my life.
I was I think I was wise enough at that age, not that I was super wise, but I was wise enough to know that that wasn't I wasn't ready to commit to that for the rest of my life, and I wanted to experience more so halfway through ninth grade, I backed out and got a pair of birkenstocks and here I am.
You joined the you joined the click across the cafeteria like that was on the other corner of the cafeteria.
I mean to tell you, man, within like a year and a half, my hair was down to here and it was like Kaki Sack every morning. But again, it was like, I'm very glad that I had that experience. It was it's good to kind of feel like you're being a part of something civic minded, especially if it's not to the detriment or to the exclusion of any one group. That's the main thing.
Yeah, you know what, I think that it's you know, I don't have that specific experience, but I think that what you're talking about is so valuable that you have a variety of experiences, go through a variety of different groups if you will, or I mean it sounds like you being civic minded and choosing something of a civic minded that's well a plus to you. But just having that experience to pull from as an actor later on
is invaluable. And it never makes sense to me, when you find that click or you decide, oh, I'm you know, a theater kid or whatever too early on, and you, you know, turn your nose up to other experiences or whatever. I think you're doing yourself a disservice for the thing that you ultimately want to do.
One hundred percent, Brian, And I think that's what you're to me. What you're saying is really about you need to kind of experience as many different walks of life as you can right on your way to being a well rounded person. And that's what really childhood, ideally and adolescence and young adulthood are all about.
You mentioned before you thought Second City was your path, that's what you were going to do. Look looking doing a little dive into your resume, it sounds like that's not exactly what happened as you left to Paul uh Anthony and Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, The Iceman, Cometh, Tracy Lets, Killer Joe by the Way, which nobody is going to know, or they did make a movie of it.
That play blew my mind. So you become.
Fairly quickly a working actor in one of the theater hotbeds in the country, Chicago, talk to me a little bit about your experience and did you then think that that was your life.
I've always dreamed of having a path kind of like what I envisioned the like the English actors path to be. They get to have this great theater background and then they sort of at some point in their careers they graduate into getting to also concurrently do film and television and that's so that's on the bucket list too. I want to be a detective in western North Carolina.
All right, you've come close, by the way, we'll talk about that. You've come pretty close, but all right, go ahead.
No.
So yeah, that was like the Anthony and Cleopatra was an audition that I did when I was still in college, and I got to play the role of Skaus, which is, you know, like a guard, like not a big role at all, but I got to be on stage with Larry Yando, Kevin Goodall, Lisa Dodson, Bradley Armacoste, Scott Parkinson, and Barbara Gaines was directing These are like luminaries of Icago Classical Theater and theater in Chicago, and it was like, holy shit.
Anything can go wrong on this stage in real time while we're doing Shakespeare, and one of these geniuses is just gonna fix it, like we can just pull and we can ride this, and we're all together and we're gonna support each other and we'll get.
To the end. And the crowd, even especially if they see the fuck ups, they're gonna love it. Well, good banana. And it was like I had spent four years learning all of this stuff in an institutional environment, but it wasn't until I got on stage with these pros that
it was like my education truly began in earnest. So that was going on, and then after I mean, I did that first production, and then in the February of two thousand, first year out of college, the production that Mike Shannon had taken to New York with Tracy Lett's play Killer Joe came back as a four like as a profit production, and the rules were at that point that they had to hire two kids in their twenties
under union contract. So I had to join the union at twenty three years old in Chicago, in a city at the time which was lousy with dudes my age who were non equity well into their thirties, So it was like, who the hell do you think you are, man, You've graduated college fifteen minutes ago, and now I got
to pick healthcare bucket. I don't think so, But you know, I was like, when I got that job, it was like the grittiest theater going on in Chicago, despite the fact that it was a production coming back from out of town. And after that, I mean, it was so intense, Brian that, like, my wife would pick me up after shows sometimes and she wouldn't know who was getting in
the car with her. But I was making a living as a theater actor in Chicago, and I was getting money into my healthcare, so I knew that the next year I'd be able to go to the doctor and do these kinds of things. And I felt like, even though it seemed like a gamble because there were so many incredibly talented actors my age, it was worth it because I knew that this was what I wanted to do.
And then I.
Survived as a union actor by winning jobs that took me to other places out of Chicago until I was old enough to kind of be in the casting pool in Chicago as a union actor.
Are you at this point are you thinking about film and television? Where do you see your life heading at that point.
I guess I had some dim idea that I would I would be one of the few people who booked a series regular role in the show that came to Chicago, which,
as you know, that was very rare. Typically when a big production is coming to a place like Minneapolis or to Chicago, it's because they're shooting on location in those cities and they're as a pretty strong well of talent local there to pick up the smaller roles, So a lot of the bigger, better roles are already cast before those shows come to Chicago Earth And I began to figure that out probably early on, but you know, I was still like I I got to audition for I
got to my first like on camera job was it was with Clint Eastwood directing, and it was Flags of our Fathers at George Gizzard was in the scene that I got to do. It was a really heady experience and they gave me half of a trailer and that was my first job. That was my first job. So I thought that was what being an actor was going to be. But I was getting on camera work often enough to where I thought, yeah, this is this is
building to something. I was also really interested in doing voice work, so from a very early age I was chasing voiceover. So I got to do a lot of voiceover over the years too, which which helped me kind of make ends meet and kind of string it together. But I always thought, there's gonna be a role that's going to take me to Los Angeles, or there's gonna be a role that's going to take me to New York. I'm not gonna leave work that i'm actively doing in this vibrant community to search it out.
Interesting. Did you find that able to be true?
I will say that when I've done work in Los Angeles and New York, and I've never lived in either of those cities, but I spent a good amount of time in them getting to work. When people found out that I was based in Chicago, they were always kind of gobsmacked. It was like, well, why did they fly your dumbass in here when there's there's so many talent wactors here. And so there was always like a certain amount of, you know, low key glee that I had kind of beat the odds just by getting a seat
at the table from Chicago. But I also felt like a representative of what this city has to offer. Chicago is lousy with incredibly talented actors like Middle America, just solid natural acting. And I feel so grateful for the time that I got to spend there, continuing to study and continuing to grind, like it was a grind, particularly when you're dealing with mother Nature, which you know is you know, pleasant in Chicago for like maybe three months of the year combined.
Right right, I mean, it's crazy, guys. John Is first two credits that at least are listed where I can find things are Flags of Our Fathers with Clenn eas Wood and Er, which at the time is like the biggest show in television. How does Er come about?
Well, they would feel exterior shots sometimes in Chicago, got it, I mean that was a big one, obviously shooting in Los Angeles, but every now and then they would have the stars of the show kind of outside on the street in Chicago to sort of place it in Chicago. And so I played a I played a doctor doctor. It was like literally doctor Collins and the props guy had Doctor Tom Collins, which was kind of a little little joke, but yeah, that was opposite Linda Carlini at
the time, which was really really cool. She's gone on to do so much amazing stuff, particularly like Dead to Me, which I don't know if you've watched that show.
Which is.
So great in that show. Yes, but you're going back to the theater. You're continuing to work in the theater through the the aughts that they call them.
And it was always there were only a handful of theater companies in Chicago at that time that were supportive of theater actors winning on camera work. Okay, without getting this is going to be really boring, but the contracts in Chicago theater allow for you to go and do on camera work, but it's always up to the theater's discretion. So you know, as a Midwestern working actor, you don't
want to burn bridges. But I was always kind of able to sneak around and do a couple days here, a couple of days there.
You're working in the theater, you're getting days or a week or whatever. In film and television and also doing voiceover work. At this point, how many commercials are you getting around this time?
Well? I did, I did. I actually won campaigns. So I was the voice of Comcast actually for about years for their television commercials I was doing the vo for them. I was the voice of on Star for many years. I did several years of McDonald's across many different ad agencies, and throughout that time I was also picking up different spots for other people who were advertising too. I did a few video games here and there, and I was getting to do on camera commercials here more and more
the later it got. I did a FedEx spot with an on camera commercial director named Jim Jenkins, and we ended up doing a couple FedEx spots. We did some other like Hyundai spots, and then we did a one off commercial for bud Light that ended up kind of becoming this whole Dilly Dilly campaign.
Yeah, I mean this is obviously where I'm going of commercials. Maybe in history it rings very It rings high on the top of people's whether you loved it or hated it. Everybody knew the king in Dilly Dilly. Now when you're doing this, are you are you on set?
Right?
So it's like if you're shooting a television show. Sometimes you'll be like, wow, you know this is this is pretty good? Are you thinking that this is going to change the world?
Dilly Dilly?
You know, we did the first one, and we were just I think bud Light were doing like four or five. They had a zombie one, they had like a Revolutionary War era one, they had this weird Game of Thrones it was ours, and then people just started using the
phrase dilly dilly. And then they brought us back for one around Thanksgiving, and then like late November they called and they were like, all right, we want to do a Super Bowl spot and we're going to do it in It's either going to be South Africa or New Zealand, so get ready. And I was like, excuse me what? And then we went to New Zealand and we filmed the Super Bowl spots in friggin New Zealand, and then we filmed in Argentina, We filmed in Czech Republic, filmed
many times in Spain. It was like a real dream to get to work on. It was a lot of fun. And you know, I think about it in terms of like we were doing beer commercials, but really we were just making ludicrous, funny for the benefit of a beer company, and yeah, it was. It was just it was just a lot of fun being like the stupidest guy in the room who kind of thought he was the smartest guy in the room, like, that's fun, that's fun space to play in.
Well, it's it's so interesting that you talked very early on about your humorous interpret days and choosing to do money Python, because really I feel like that's what that commercial was. It was like classic Monty Python humor done in a really big and broad way but in a way that everyone could understand and ludicrous but fun, just funny.
That's how I view it, viewed it anyway.
Good.
Do you feel like the success of that campaign propelled your career forward?
You know, I was sitting on a boat in Columbia on the Magdalena River with John Krazinsky, bitching and moaning about my fear that that campaign would ruin my career, and Krazinsky was like, dude, just bet on yourself, Just bet on yourself. And he was also like everyone's doing commercials these days, man, And I remember, like he did.
I think his story about insurance. You probably remember when he for like fifteen years after that, all the vo casting departments were like, give us a John Krazinski read. You know it was it was funny because I think it was such a it was this dumb kind of quasi period character and this big, long flowing robe. But
it was a character. And I guess the viewing public who were seeing those either they put it together or they didn't, But if they did, it didn't really one didn't detract from the other necessarily in an odd way, which I'm very, very grateful for because you know, as you've been talking about, a lot of the roles that I've played on film and television have been pretty serious, and so I'm grateful. I feel fortunate to have gotten to be a part of those stories. But I also
feel grateful and fortunate to get to make funny. You know, if your career starts to go in one direction, people start to think, well, that's what Brian does, that's all Brian wants to do. It's not necessarily the case as not necessarily all Brian can bring to the table. That's just kind of what you guys keep asking Brian to do. That's what I think. That's what it's been for me. So I feel like I've gotten a few got a few lucky ones in there where I've gotten to do funny stuff too.
That's awesome. Who's John Krazinski? Uh?
He was this young actor who he portrayed, showed it a fledgling Amazon production.
Yes, John worked with my old pal, other John John and I put that together. What was it like working with John on the first two seasons of Jack Ryan?
Oh he was great man.
Come on, no, no, no, no, no, come on, just we're looking for truth here.
What was it like? What was it like working with John.
In this one scene where we were like going into this like suspected terrorists den in Paris and John and I were like at the back of a line of like, uh, you know, like hardcore commando type dudes going up the stairs and stuff. And he kept dropping the clip out of his gun on the hard tile floor just to make me laugh. I mean, we were like a couple of fucking children, and it was like, this is a big budget TV show, And every time I laughed, and then he would just.
Do it again because yeah, that sounds about right.
I will say, this is a cool thing. He So between season one and season two, A Quiet Place came out, Yes, and it changed the dynamic on set going into season two, and John had suddenly a lot more ability to kind of talk about how he saw the scenes coming together, and it was really cool. To see him kind of
rise to the moment. This's the thing that is like, you know, I think there are actors out there who just love to play different roles, and then there are actors who are geared to kind of take over the world. And John is one of the second category. I mean, he's like the people that you see at the top of their game. It's not a mistake. They put in a lot of time, a lot of effort, worked really fricking hard, and that was that was kind of my take on John. But he John is awesome. He's been
really cool. I wish I could give you more shitty stories, but he always like he was one of them. So we're surrounded by Navy seals, which is kind of like, you don't want to do your own stunts. That's cool, uh, you know, but John all like always wanted to do his own stunts because he didn't want to catch any shade from these Navy seals.
Oh he did come on them a.
Lot, man, it's like, and some of them were were kind of dangerous, like he he he had We've all been like kind of busted up on that set, but he just keeps coming back. He's a tank man. He's getting it done. Wow, I can see I've let you down.
I mean a little bit. I mean a little bit. He and I relates to Jack Ryan. This is like, this is like such a humble brag story. But I was invited to Europe basically to play golf with Prince Albert of Monaco. And I am in this very very fancy, nice hotel and there was a yacht thing. I mean, it was the whole thing. And my phone goes off. It's in the evening. My phone goes off and it's a text message from John. I don't remember exactly what it was, but my memory is that the text message says,
what the fuck are you in Monaco? And I was like, first of all, how do you know, like what where I'm like looking around, and he was there. I don't know if you were there. He was there, I think to like do some festival or I don't know, but it was about Jack Ryan. It was like the opening of Jack Ryan or whatever. And he was there. And so there you go. We can't see each other in the United States, but you know, suddenly we're like sleeping
next to each other in this hotel in Monaco. You guys went Montreal, Columbia, Morocco, France.
How was that? How was it? I mean it sounds like you you did that for the Dilly Dilly too. How was that?
Traveling around so much on that show? Was it fun or was it? Was it a grind?
It was?
It was fun. It was an incredible experience, particularly like our time in Morocco. One of the coolest things I did was I I got to go out to the western Sahara and spend the night in the desert on the dunes, and that was absolutely an amazing experience. Yeah. And the time in Colombia was we were on like the National Police training headquarters near a small city called Hiradok in kind of central Colombia, about two and a half hours away from Bogatah. Yeah, man, it was. It was.
It was super intense and very challenging, but ultimately a really really cool ride.
You've said that the role reminded you of your own inner voice or your family back home. What do you mean by that.
I'm just kind of talking about like dudes you'd come across in North Carolina who were just kind of like, man, I was. I'm gonna tell you what earlier this week, our dog was in the yard and a turkey walked across the yard and the dog ran up that turkey ended up in the tree. I mean, just that kind of stuff, you know. God, Okay, it just is kind of like that's what's below all the theater school training,
you know, Right. So when I went in to read for that, I just kind of let it roll, and I saw this guy as someone who is actually, if you play badass, it kind of makes him seem like, maybe he's not such a badass, right. I just I just kind of thought that he placing him in a sort of real approachable place made him more of a real human being. And I guess I guess that that's all I was going for.
I have to mention a show, and I don't know that I ever do this when I'm talking to people, talk specifically about my feelings, unless it's just straight praise of a show. You had a role of Carl Wilkes in Castle Rock. I thought that show was so freaking interesting. I thought it was flawed. I'm gonna be honest with you,
I thought a lot of it didn't work. It's so complicated that it's hard to even explain what it is except it's basically Stephen King's mind and his characters throughout the history of his writings existing semi simultaneously in the same town. John plays Annie Wilkes's father, Annie Wilkes, of course, going on to be the villain the lead of Misery played by Kathy Bates, who appeared in the office Boom.
There's my association. F. John Krasinsky. F John Krasinsky, You played the father of Annie Wilkes that Kathy Bates won an oscar for. Talk to me about the experience that you had on that show. Was Stephen King around?
I'm sure he was in touch with the producers and the writers and everyone.
He was not generals, he was not Okay, good, okay. It makes me feel better that I wasn't involved.
We were in Massachusetts. That filmed in Massachusetts, which was beautiful when we were there. We were about an hour west of Boston. And Lizzie Kaplan who played Annie, and Ruby Cruz who played young Annie in the in the flashbacks, both just phenomenal talents. Lizzie Man, she was just so committed, so professional. It was a super intense experience. Particularly I guess it is it a spoiler if I talk about kind of the final scene.
I mean, I did, I didn't know. No, it's been four years. No, it's not a spoiler, go ahead.
They the dad is pushed down some stairs.
Flight of stairs. You did. That's not yourself, like John, right, it's not myself.
Yes, And I was impaled on a banister and they run a they run a hose of blood kind of up your shirt and next to your face, and that's kind of going off while you play this scene with your daughter. And it was, man, it was that was super intense, but actually a lot of fun and really
really disturbing, really disturbing. It's a lot of fun to get to do harror every now and then to scare people and to dig into the things that people are I was going to say triggered by, but that's kind of a loaded term.
Yeah.
I just thought that the series was super fascinating and it's it's good to hear that it was a good experience and also not surprising that it was. That it was difficult, an amazing cast, and yeah, if you haven't checked it out, it's worth checking out. Got to talk to you about Dope Sick, The show of twenty twenty one twenty twenty two for sure, Randy Ramsayer, Ramsayer, Ramsire, Ramsire whatever, Randy, uh that was? This is my reference to the playing a cop in western North Carolina, close
but not quite. Talk to me about your experience working on Dope Sick and interestingly, an incredibly dark I loved it, incredibly dark show. Did you have a positive experience working on Dope Sick and did you expect that to be well the show of the last year or so.
I absolutely had a positive experience on it. I learned so much. You know that that's one of the conversations that has been on a slow boil in this country for over twenty years, to reading OxyContin and all these things going on, and we've all known that we've been kind of fed a line on this, these prescription painkillers.
But it wasn't until shows and documentarians really started to do a kind of a deep dive into the connection between this one company and the way that these drugs are sort of insinuated into the healing process when you get hospitalized, and kind of making all these connections and finding out that certain aspects of the testing going through the FDA were all kind of fiddled with. It woke me up to a lot of ways that we can certainly do better. Danny Strong, who was the writer and
the producer, was a constant. It was like walking around with an encyclopedia. This guy had so much knowledge in his brain the whole time.
But also.
It was kind of like that situation where the darker the subject matter, the more levity there is offscreen because the people telling those stories have to find a balance or you just absolutely go insane. Yeah, you know, it's it's a very different path for an actor on a
set like that. And the cool thing is casts and the producers sort of understand what it is that you have to find within yourself on a given day, and they will give you space to find it, and they will they will kind of try and find a way to be supportive of you. But it was we shot that and rich In and around Richmond, Virginia. It was a lovely time to get to work in. It was. It was a great experience. And the first couple episodes were directed, of course by Barry Levinson, which was a
real honor to get to work with him. He was one of he's one of these directors who knows exactly what's going in the final cut. He knows what he's going to use, so there's a he's very efficient and very direct in getting what he needed from the actors. Was wonderful to get to work with all those.
Guys, being from North Carolina now living back in North Carolina, that is a state and an area there that has suffered a lot from the opioid epidemic. Did you have a personal connection to this because of that?
Yeah.
There are suboxym clinics, which is one of the drugs that they try and do replacement therapy with all over the place here, and I think that that was one of the things that I learned is that cold turkey and prayer doesn't work all that well. Unfortunately with people who are addicted to drugs like this. You're lucky if you get off it and stay off it at all. A lot of times, the more humane way to stop using it is to slowly step down with a replacement
And certainly it has touched these addictions. Have touched people in my family, They've touched so many people in America, and it's something that it's like a dirty, little household secret for so many people. And that was one of the things that I was eager to tackle was how are we going to portray people who become addicted to
this drug? You know, if it's a high school football football player who suffers a knee injury and is given OxyContin and then four months later their life is ruined and they have to find something cheaper, so they switch to heroin. Generally, we in this country, I think, have thought of people who become drug addicts as morally weak for people who have suffered, and the reality is often
so much more nuanced than that. And so I think one of the things that the show really got right was how you can become addicted to some of these drugs when the situation is constructed and architected in such a way to make people become addicted through no fault
of your own. And I feel like that that was the thing that the show got right, because that was one of the comments that we got over and over and over again was oh, man, my aunt suffered this, my grandmother, my son, my daughter, I have I'm still working on this, you know. And then I have had people friends and family who have, you know, kind of casually over the years asked about, yeah, if you have any pills or because I'm suffering this and I'm having
a hard time getting blah blah blah. That's what that is.
I mean, that's.
Right, and I know, you know. The other argument is when shows go after oxyconton like this, you're taking a very valuable tool out of the doctor's hands. And I
don't think that was what the show was saying. I think what the show was saying was like, when you're dealing with end of life pain or when you are under a doctor's direct supervision, this is an absolutely a valuable tool, but it's not a valuable tool for myriad other inies that one can sustain and live with and perhaps manage with different classes of drugs that are not addictive in the same way that an opioid is.
Yeah, that was certainly my takeaway that really the issue was the lack of transparency with how addictive it was, and then potentially the over prescribing, which triggered that faster and faster.
Walking into a hospital, you know, with an injury or some severe pain and being shown you know, the smiley face graph from smiley to frownie, where are you on this spectrum? And learning that that was kind of something that was constructed to make pain treatment a conversation that's at the front and center of conversations with doctors when you're healing and healing, and obviously dealing with pain is
horrible and something that needs to be done empathetically. But when you have a company that stands to gain billions of dollars kind of wagging the federal government around or its agencies, that's something that we need to look very very closely at to make sure that, you know, ideally the government exists to make sure that we are kept safe from the crueler intentions of corporate entities.
Did you meet Randyr Yeah, he.
Got to Zoom and then he came to an event I think in Washington. Got to meet him there, and he's a super laid back, cool guy, you know. And these guys were like bulldogs, like they were immovable. There was they weren't going anywhere once they started with this, and that's kind of the cool thing. It's like, you may think of us as small town and therefore you may not take us seriously, but we take this job very seriously. We work on the taxpayer's dime and we're
not going to stop until justice has been served. Yeah, the really compelling story him in Rick Mountcastle just out.
Not that you need any more, but John, but Waco the aftermath. I'm very, very interested in this. When I went to SMU, this is when Waco happened. From the public television in my dorm room in college, we watched it, and of course it's I don't know, sixty eighty miles down the road this was all taking place, So I feel this weird connection to it. I don't want you to give any spoilers, but what was that like going back to yet another true story, a tragedy and exploring the aftermath of that.
So Clive Doyle, who I portray in the show, was a branch Davidian I remember that time too. I was fifteen turning sixteen that April. Yeah, I remember, probably like you do. There were you know, it was like three or four network news sources that were all kind of giving the same information on the standoff, and the idea was basically, these people were insane and they were making the situation worse and worse, and the government was just trying to get the kids out of there and keep
everybody safe. And I think that's all generally accurate. However, there's so much more that went into pushing the government into the standoff, and that kept this group of ultra orthodox in the middle of the desert in Texas from complying and coming out of the buildings without giving anything away. Clive immigrated to the United States in the early sixties with his mom from Australia and had been at the
compound for thirty years already when the fire happened. So I thought at the time that this was kind of a new group of people, and he had moved, and they were into guns, and they were marrying girls off very young, and this community had been there for many decades even prior to Clive arriving in the sixties. From a technical aspect, they wanted an actor who could find a way to also weave in a Texas dialect to this sort of soft Australian accent. So that was kind
of a fun challenge to try and tackle. But yeah, Clive was I think a tantamount to a monk, and he also inhabited a world where miracles were all over the place. And this guy sitting next to him who begins as Vernon Howell and then kind of chooses the name David Koresh is to this group of people, he's the embodiment of God. He literally is the lamb they believe, and at a certain point, Koresh tells this group of people, I'm the only one who can have sex with anyone.
So if you're married and I choose your wife, you have to be okay with that. And stunning how many of them stayed so to kind of study this against the backdrop of everything the federal government was doing at the time. It's an incredibly messy story from so many angles. I think that the takeaway for the federal government was if you back people with extreme beliefs into a corner, it's likely that they will do extreme things. Technically, what that means is that the government ends up acting more
empathetically when there are guns involved. Then that's a good thing. As an actor, I want more empathy everywhere. I want us to strive to understand the worldview of those that we don't agree with. We have to make the effort to understand which is distinct and separate from agreeing with them.
That's right.
I don't know that we're all going to ever agree on everything. I don't think that's realistic, but we have to spend time trying to understand. And that's why I think this show is important is it's a continued meditation on what went wrong, which means producers and a network are sitting around trying to understand how we got to
that place then and the doubtles. The producers and directors and creators of the show are drawing a bright red line from that event to Charlottesville and to January sixth.
I think one, you're awesome and to the point that you bring up there is so important on both sides of this debate or war that's raging in the United States, and not having any empathy for the other side, whatever side that is, and behaving toward them in a harsh and unsympathetic and unempathetic way is only going to make them strengthen their resolve. As you said, that's incredible because yeah, we're still we're still trying to figure it out.
God.
And side note, I don't even know. I mean, I watched this other show. Did they talk about that in the waycoat that had been going on that long in the sixth in the sixties, that had been going on.
I miss that. I had no idea.
Yeah, Lois So Lois Rodin, Jay Smith Cameron wonderful Actors. He plays Lois Rodin in this season. She is the prophet of the era and she sort of inherited being the prophet from her husband, who inherited it from another guy. So it's a shootoff of a shootoff of the Seventh day Adventist denoment.
Yeah, and you know.
It was the kind of thing where and again, I want to talk about it without demeaning a group of
people's beliefs. So it would be, you know, the idea that the it's all going to end on this day, and then that day comes and goes, and then I've gotten another prophecy, and now I was wrong, It's actually going to end on this day, and so forth and so on, and the Branch Davidians it was known by the federal government at this point that their theology was that the world was going to end in fire, and they had listening devices in the compound and apparently had
audio of the Branch Davidians planning to set fire in various locations if the federal government ever breached the walls. They knew that, you know, the tear gas they were going to use was highly flammable, and they also knew that the branch Davidians had been talking about setting the fire.
So it does become very very messy. So two things that I think about on this show are like, David Koresh committed suicide by cop and he took eighty souls with him, and the federal government for its part, was over eager to be used in that regard for a number of reasons. Also, there were three I believe three government entities on the ground at Waco. You had the ATF, which started the raid and called cameras there to film it because they were facing an existential crisis in Congress
they needed to televise win. So this this standoff ultimately becomes a debacle in a tragedy. But when four ATF agents are killed and the FBI shows up, now you have two forces who are not actually working in concert, and then you have the hostage rescue team who has its own goals. So there was no general sort of telling everybody what the next step needs to be. Yeah, and tragedy ensues.
Fascinating.
It was something that we we spent a lot of time learning about and studying about, and I don't want oral government is one blame or that the branch Davidians are one hundred percent to blame, but it is worthy of study.
Well that's you know.
Where great art lives, as far as I'm concerned, is in the question, not in the answers. So exploring all sides is valuable and ultimately hopefully changes things for the future. John, thank you so much for your time you Knox goes away. I hear you've just wrapped principal photography on that. Another Michael Keaton adventure. Good luck with that. I'm a big fan of his and a huge fan of yours as well.
I will be watching whatever you do next.
Thank you for this time together. This has been a lot of fun.
Man.
Yeah, thank you so much, John, I appreciate it. Good luck.
Thank you sir, take care.
That was so much fun. Thank you so much for hopping on after talking to you. Let me just say I am so excited to watch Waco the Aftermath. It was a story I followed very closely years ago, but to hear the residences from today's world, well, well I just can't wait. Listeners, make sure to look out for John in Waco.
He is going to be awesome.
I know it, and of course make sure to leave a comment on our Instagram. Tune into next week for Off the Beat, Same time, same place, same me.
We'll see you then.
Off the Beat is hosted and executive produced by me Brian Baumgartner, alongside our executive producer, Ling Lee. Our senior producer is Diego Tapia. Our producers are Liz Hayes, Hannah Harris, and Emily Carr. Talent producer is Ryan Papa Zachary, and our intern is Sammy Katz. Our theme song Bubble and Squeak, performed by the one and only Creed Bratton,