Jonah Hill is in the New York offices of his film distributor, A24, as he almost always is these days. There is a conference room that the executives here at the company would probably like to use, but can't, because Jonah Hill is in there all the time, talking about the movie he directed, Mid90s. The conference room has a Mid90s poster on the wall. It's as silent and hushed as a shrine. Here he can just talk, and talk, and talk, about Mid90s—he's been doing it all fall, with no dip in stamina or energy. Every conversation is like the first conversation he's ever had about it. There's no way of overstating the breadth of his enthusiasm, his terror, his pride, his manic energy around this film. “It's my best friend,” he says about Mid90s. He's dressed all in black, like he might go direct another movie right now. Golden hair, golden beard, attentive stare. “It's literally my best friend. Like, anytime I was sad, angry, happy, lonely, I'd go in my room and I'd just write, spend time with this, cater to it, build it. And then now it goes off into the world and someone can…beat it and punish it or hug it. This kind of thing is vulnerable in a way I've never experienced before.”


Suit, $2,580, by Prada / Sweater, $840, by Prada at Mr Porter

The film, which took four years and 20 drafts and a whole lot of his soul to finish, contains basically everything Hill has ever loved: skating, rap music, '90s independent cinema, Los Angeles. It's about a young kid named Stevie, played by a young kid named Sunny Suljic, who lives in a fraught and abusive home and is ultimately adopted by a crew of older skateboarders, who introduce him to drugs and girls and the freedom that comes from bashing yourself into concrete from greater and greater heights. It's the best fictional film about skateboarding since Kids, and it has the Harmony Korine cameo to prove it. Hill takes the awesome nihilism of that film and turns it inside out, to make something intimate and a little sad about self-love and acceptance.

As an actor, Hill first became known for his particular skill in playing a type of character—whether in 2007's Superbad, the comedy that made him famous, or 2013's The Wolf of Wall Street, the drama that garnered him his second of two Oscar nominations—who used aggression to camouflage hurt: He was an open wound, but with serrated edges. He often felt, and acted, that way in real life, too. “I think he's always been vulnerable,” Emma Stone, who has known Hill since they co-starred in Superbad, says. “And he's always been incredibly sensitive.” But as a 34-year-old director, Hill is a mood seeker, a nurturer. The film is harsh in the way its protagonists—mostly untrained actors, from which Hill extracts measured, naturalistic performances—talk to one another, as skaters in the '90s did, but Hill is primarily in search of transcendence: This is what the light looks like at the end of a Los Angeles day. This is what it feels like to make a friend. This is what it's like to be known.

Making the film changed something deep inside him, Hill says. It made him…happy. Happier, anyway. It's not that he's giving up on being an actor—just this year he starred in Gus Van Sant's Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, as a recovering addict with a penchant for gold watches, flowing robes, and deep empathy, and in Cary Fukunaga's Netflix series, Maniac, in an on-screen reunion with Stone. But making a film of his own allowed him to see himself differently somehow: as not just an actor but a peer to the directors he used to act for, like Martin Scorsese, or the Coen brothers. Hill's not comparing himself to these guys; he's just thrilled he gets to talk shop with them now. He's been texting with Paul Thomas Anderson about Mid90s—Hill's assistant recently framed the exchange and gave it to him as a gift. “It has my really sweaty, neurotic texts,” Hill says, and then Anderson's response. Hill almost fell over when the first message came in. Okay, the truth is: He did fall over.


Maybe 15 minutes after he tells me this story, he's standing in the A24 lobby when the elevator doors open and a fearsome-looking man in khaki shorts and sunglasses staggers out. “Oh shit,” Hill says. It's Paul Schrader: the guy who wrote Taxi Driver, who just this year made a late-stage masterpiece with First Reformed, which is also distributed by A24. “Oh shit,” Hill says again. He goes silent for the first time in hours. Schrader tells the receptionist, in his thundering trash-compactor voice, that he's here for an appointment and then sits and glowers into the middle distance.

Hill's looking at me, but he's really looking over my shoulder. Paul Schrader, in the flesh. Here for the same reason Hill is. Member of the same club. Hill's grinning nearly uncontrollably. He keeps trying to resume whatever conversation we were having and then discovering Schrader all over again, right there. “Fuck,” Hill says. “Can we even talk right now?”

Eventually he works up the nerve to make eye contact. And then: a little nervous wave. Schrader, impassive, nods back. Hill smiles even wider.

Jacket, $160, by Carhartt Wip / T-shirt, $350, by The Row / Pants, $300, by Très Bien at Mr Porter / Glasses, his own (throughout), by Friedrich's Optik / Watch, his own, by Patek Philippe

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Picture a young Jonah Hill: middle child, growing up in the Cheviot Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, by the Fox lot and a public golf course, son of a guy who was an accountant for Guns N' Roses and a costume-designer mother. He was an inside creature: “A Simpsons kid. A movie kid.” Someone who became funny early out of ambition, and as a way of hiding. “I think humor when I was young was a good way to avoid intimacy,” Hill says. His parents were supportive of their TV-obsessed child. “But they wanted me to get outside and be a kid, too.”

Skating did that for Hill. Like Stevie, the protagonist of Mid90s, Hill started going to his local skate shop around 12 or 13. Skating turned out to be a way of getting out of his own head. “I was like, ‘I'm smoking cigarettes. I'm watching people drinking 40s, people fighting, people are laughing, there're no adults around, and we're literally at a courthouse where trials are going on and we're running away from the cops.’ Like, What? I was just playing with Pogs six months ago. And now I'm running away from cops.” Skating also “broke me out of a racial and socio-economic bubble that I may never have gotten out of. It really opened my world up.”

But movies were always the thing he wanted to do. He went to school with Dustin Hoffman's kids, and Hoffman ultimately introduced him to the director David O. Russell, who cast Hill in a small part in I ♥ Huckabees. Later, recordings would emerge from that set of Russell screaming at his lead actress, Lily Tomlin. Jonah Hill was right there. His first time ever on a movie set: “I was like, ‘This is what Hollywood is like?’ ”

But Huckabees got him a small part in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. He was supposed to have only a couple of lines in that film, but it rained, and that messed up the shooting schedule enough to give him a half-day on set—sufficient time to start improvising new lines in front of Judd Apatow, who was so impressed that he cast Hill as the lead in Superbad. He was 22 years old, acting in “the Citizen Kane of the kind of movie you like when you're 22.” This was probably the last time Hill's life was normal. He remembers the billboard with his face on it that went up above the apartment he was living in at the time: “No one knows who you are, and then the next day people are staring at you or coming up to you. And I mean overnight. It wasn't gradual for me at all.”

Comedy was Hill's way into Hollywood, but even early on, he sought out dramatic roles, too: The Duplass brothers cast him in 2010's mumblecore romance Cyrus, as Marisa Tomei's malevolent large adult son. It was a sinister and yet still comic performance that Hill then showed to director Bennett Miller, who ultimately put him in 2011's Moneyball. That role, as the soft-spoken baseball-analytics adviser to a shaggy Brad Pitt, got Hill his first Oscar nomination. He spent the next few years showing up at auditions alongside the same three guys: “There were four of us. Shia LaBeouf would get the offer, Jesse Eisenberg would get it if he turned it down, and then me and Paul Dano would fight for the scraps. We were always the weirdos, essentially. They were the more palatable, digestible options.”


At 25 he executive-produced a movie at Sony called The Sitter: He picked the script, chose the director, selected himself as the lead actor. This was a young man's power move that he looks back at now with amusement and some embarrassment, as if it had happened to someone else entirely. “The Sitter is the one that everyone clowns me for. Like ‘The Rock as the tooth fairy’ kind of movie. Like a fake bad movie. Like ‘Jonah Hill's a crazy babysitter!’ But I get it, dude. I tried.” Hill hired David Gordon Green to direct and attempted to get Brooklyn indie duo Ratatat to score the film. In his review, Roger Ebert wrote, “I don't blame Green for working in the genre. But I blame him for making a bad movie that isn't funny.”

Jacket, $2,950, shirt, $850, pants, $1,050, by The Row / Boots, his own (throughout), by Dries Van Noten
Sweater, $1,095, by The Row / Coat, $1,850, by Dries Van Noten / Pants, $825, by Giorgio Armani / Boots, his own (throughout), by Dries Van Noten / Glasses, his own, by Friedrich's Optik

In retrospect, this experience would be one of the first clues that maybe Hill's path lay elsewhere, outside of being a studio star. Hill realized that trying to improve the soundtrack of a mainstream comedy wasn't going to make the work fulfilling, for him or anyone else. “That was a big swing,” he says. “Me, at 25, being the producer of a big Fox movie, and going to Tom Rothman, who was running Fox, and him being like, ‘Who the fuck is Ratatat?’ I'm like, ‘You don't get it!’ You know, you're in those movies, and you're like, ‘This is what would make it different than every other movie you put out.’

“And then you realize: ‘Oh, I'm in the wrong system.’ ”

Hill likes to say: “Everything is everything.” He has an aversion to the kind of narrative most actors develop about themselves over the years—the usual recitation of triumphs, followed by setbacks, followed by the triumphant overcoming of those setbacks, etc. Instead, Hill seems drawn to the middle of things, the mushy place where experiences were neither good nor bad. Recently, Hill published a zine, called Inner Children. The first sentence of it reads, “I got famous in my late teens and then spent most of my young adult life listening to people say that I was fat and gross and unattractive.” Does he regret becoming famous? No: It brought him here, to Gus Van Sant and Maniac and Mid90s. Does he wish he had made a different first impression to the world? Sure. The experience, ultimately, was what it was. Everything is everything.

He will admit now that he used to dread encounters like this one, sitting across from a journalist. “I always felt like this little kid who was being attacked,” he says. “If you're funny at all, people are allowed to just rip on you. And it makes you feel like shit. You feel like you're being bullied, like you were when you were 9, but you're at work at an interview and anyone's allowed to say whatever they want to you and you react. I reacted horribly.”

Most actors learn to lie their way through these encounters. But Hill never did. “My mom always makes fun of me,” he says. “She's like, ‘You're the worst actor in real life.’ Like, I got caught in every lie. I got caught in every mistake I made. And I'm like, now, ‘Dude, just don't listen to what they're saying or don't let it hurt you.’ But it hurt me. And I'm a sensitive person, and I thought I was being cool by being honest or something, you know?”

It took a car crash of an encounter with a Rolling Stone interviewer who asked him what kind of farter he was (“I'm not answering that dumb question! I'm not that kind of person! Being in a funny movie doesn't make me have to answer dumb questions!”) and a screening of Damien Chazelle's Whiplash to finally goad him first into re-evaluating why he was reacting the way he was reacting and then, ultimately, into stepping out of the system that made him famous.


“It was all right around the same time,” Hill remembers, “where it's like: ‘Okay, am I gonna be, like, 50 and this guy is gonna ask me about farts?’ And then at the same time, Spike Jonze and my sister and I saw Whiplash, and we walk out and we all love the movie, and Spike's like, ‘How old is that guy?’ And he's younger than me. That night I went home and started writing the fucking movie. Because I was like, ‘Why am I being an asshole? Why am I being defensive? What about me personally is making that happen and where am I at in regards to where I want to be at?’ And no one does that for you. Both the personal work and the creative or professional work, it's like, put your money where your mouth is and stop talking about it and do it.”

So he decided to move to New York and go and do it.

About These Clothes
Jonah's as much a fashion enthusiast as any of us at GQ. So when he traded in his Palace hoodies and Grateful Dead tie-dye tees for the polished uniform of a newly minted auteur, what was he going to do, dial back his drip? Here he rocks a subtle suit from an emerging force of luxury men's fashion (The Row) and a clean chore coat from streetwear's favorite heritage brand (Carhartt), proving that there's never been a better time to embrace minimalist style. (The Chelsea boots—which Hill can be seen wearing all over the Internet with the infamous Phoenix Suns jersey 'fit of 2018—are his own.)

Jacket, $7,995, by Brunello Cucinelli / T-shirt, $350, and sweatpants, $2,990, by The Row

Over the past few years, Hill has become an improbable style icon, and lately he has adopted a new uniform: black sweater, black pants, black boots. “I've kind of started to wear the same thing every day, and I realized I really like it,” he says. We're at what might be his favorite restaurant in the world, Shuko, a sushi place in the East Village.

It took Hill some time to even realize that the way he dressed had become an object of fascination, he says: something that people noticed and celebrated on the Internet. He began wearing Palace and tie-dye and skate brands owned by his friends mixed in with designer stuff; he looked both well-dressed and relatable, like he was on his way to the same office or bar that you were. But because he was Jonah Hill, a whole culture sprang up around his outfits. For instance:

“Did you see the jersey tucked into the dress pants?” Hill asks.

I did. After Hill moved to New York, photographers began staking out his apartment, and his gym, and a new genre of photo emerged: Hill, iced coffee or cigarette in hand, on the streets of SoHo, wearing the increasingly elevated streetwear silhouettes he favored until he switched to his current uniform. In September, one of these photos went viral: Hill, a big grin on his face, wearing dark dress pants, a colorful belt, and a game-ready Phoenix Suns jersey. (As one talented Twitter user described it: “when you have a business meeting at 6 pm but a 48-point loss at 7.”)


One question about Hill's phase as a street-style icon—one question about Hill, in general—is whether or not he is in on the joke. For a while, no one could really tell. But at least when it comes to the jersey tucked into dress pants: Yes, Jonah Hill is in on the joke. “That was a really funny one, because it went viral. It had people fighting over whether it was sick or not. People will come up to me and they'll say, like, ‘Dude, jersey in the dress pants. So sick.’ ”

The story, for the record, is this: Hill was with his sister one day, at his apartment, photographers waiting. “It was really hot, and I knew they were outside,” Hill says. “I just saw this Suns jersey, but I left a meeting and I was wearing dress pants and dress shoes, so to me that was funny. I did think it was sick, but it's one of those things where you don't know where the joke is—where the joke meets the actual choice. Because we saw photographers and I was like, ‘Watch this, I'm gonna fuck with these guys. They're gonna take my picture.’ ” And they did.

At an earlier phase of Hill's life, he might have experienced this as an existential crisis, being staked out by paparazzi, his every outfit and appearance dissected by jokers on the Internet with a lot of free time and advanced Photoshop skills. But now he's finding a way to just go with it, to make it his. “If there's gonna be weirdos with cameras outside my house, I'm gonna at least take some control by having fun with it,” Hill says. He's been working on accepting what he cannot change.“My life is abnormal, and it's been abnormal for a long time, but I always tried to pretend it was super normal. And there is a lot of normalcy to it. But outside of the front door, it's weird and it's abnormal and it's great and it's everything.” Like he said, everything is everything.

Right around when he says this, he leans over the recently sanded bar at Shuko to say hi to the chef, Jimmy. It takes only a moment for him to look down and realize what he's done. He's in sawdust up to his elbows. He's coated in shaved wood. You can see on his face how stricken he is. His black uniform has gone tan. He goes to the men's room to clean what he can. And then he returns, laughing, trying his best to shrug it off. He's going to try to calm back down, he says. “I can get shaken up really easily. Like, once you put both full forearms in sawdust at the beginning…”

They seat us in a little cave-like room in the basement. Hill breathes the stress out and smiles. “I'm so much better in a cozy environment than, like, a party environment,” he says. “Because even at 34, I still get social anxiety.”

“He doesn't like to have small talk, ever, at all,” Emma Stone tells me later. They'd be on the Maniac set between takes, “and he wanted to talk about the nature of relationships and the starting point of insecurities.”

The waiter emerges with the first course: West Coast Dungeness crab with cucumber and chrysanthemum flowers. “I always eat flowers for lunch, dude,” Hill jokes.

The cast of Mid90s (clockwise from far left): Na-Kel Smith, Olan Prenatt, Ryder McLaughlin, Sunny Suljic, and Gio Galicia.


In Mid90s, Stevie is a kid with a rough home life: a single mother, played by Katherine Waterston, with a penchant for bad men; an elder brother (Lucas Hedges) whom he worships and who bullies him mercilessly. But when Stevie gets out into the world, skates, makes friends, one of the first things he finds out is that his life is no better or worse than anyone else's. This epiphany was Hill's as much as it was his character's: “There's a line in the movie, like, ‘If you look inside of anybody else's closet, you wouldn't trade your shit for their shit.’ A lot of the film is based on that scene. And I'm obsessed with that idea. And really it's: You're never gonna get rid of what you're embarrassed of, any moment in your life, and you really have to, as corny as it is, find self-acceptance. Like, ‘This is who I am, and it's great.’ And I really struggled in my 20s with, like, understanding who I was or everyone telling me I was something different than I was.”

Stone says she recognized immediately the way that Mid90s was about Hill: “He clearly had just reflected so much on his childhood. And then he wrote it all down and cracked his heart open.”

Hill commandeers the stereo and puts on Travis Scott—“This might be the album of the year”—which eventually leads to a conversation about the time Hill went to Wyoming to see a MAGA-hat-era Kanye West unveil his new album. Hill's had to answer a lot of questions about this trip since. “My sister didn't speak to me for a week. We got into a fight.” And she was probably right, he says. “Now I'm just like: I love him as an artist, but I don't agree with the shit he's talking about right now, and I want to understand. I think that the people that love him, like myself, it's getting a little past the point of, like: Just tell us something. Help us love you, you know?”

The waiter returns with more rafts of sushi, including something he describes as “young shrimp.”

“Young Shrimp, that's my hip-hop name,” Hill says. Suddenly he looks concerned. “I've never heard of young shrimp.”

It means they're, uh, new to the world.



“Oh, man.”

He eats around the shrimp, until it's the last thing left, and then tentatively lifts it to his mouth, before immediately spitting it out into a napkin: “Too young! It's too young!”

Sweater, $840, by Prada at Mr Porter / Suit, $2,580, by Prada / Glasses, his own / Watch, his own, by Patek Philippe

Hill shot Mid90s over 35 days last summer, using mostly unknown actors. He says it was surreal, watching his teenage cast hanging around the set, laughing and talking, like looking at himself circa Superbad: “It reminded me of sitting around with Michael Cera and Emma Stone and Martha MacIsaac and Chris Mintz-Plasse, and we're all making fun of each other and roasting each other at lunch, because when you're young, that's what you do.” Now he was the adult at the table.

After he finished production on Mid90s, Hill went straight into filming Maniac. At the end of the year, he returned to the editing room to complete the film. On December 22, 2017, Hill's elder brother, the music manager Jordan Feldstein, died of what was later revealed to be a pulmonary thromboembolism—a blood clot, essentially. An early version of Mid90s that I saw was dedicated to him. In the film, Stevie's relationship with his elder brother is complicated: He worships him, and learns about the world from him. But he's also the guy Stevie needs to get out from under in order to become his own man. I ask Hill how true to life that was for him and his brother.

“I definitely learned about hip-hop from my brother. I would sneak into his room, and that's how I learned about everything. I had better taste in film and music than I ever would have had, because he was six years older and had great taste. And we fought like brothers fight, but it's not a biopic of our life together.”

For the final version of the film, the one in theaters, Hill removed the dedication. “When I was showing it to people I know intimately, they understood. But when we started showing it to an audience, they're like, ‘What?’ It's asking a lot of an audience to understand the intimate details of my life. The film is for him, but I took out the straight dedication.” He's silent for a while. “The timing was really fucked. So it was on my mind every day. Thank God for the movie. The movie saved my life in a lot of different ways.” He says he was reluctant to finish it, until he absolutely had to—he didn't lock a cut until right before the Toronto Film Festival, this past fall. Letting go of the edit felt like letting go of more than just the movie. All the feelings had gotten mixed up together. “That's why it was hard to say goodbye,” he says.

“I do like to look for life lessons and all the parallels of this stuff. Because it makes it something bigger. When you're giving your time to it and you love it and you love films like I do, if you love writing—it's like you give yourself to it, but I like to think you're getting something more out of it, too. And even really shitty bad experiences, if your eyes are open, you're getting something out of it. So I try and look at life that way, and it's been helpful.”

I imagine that's easier said than done.

“For sure. But also, practice makes perfect.” He stops. “Actually practice doesn't make perfect. But practice makes better.”

Hill likes to tell a story about something Spike Jonze told him, a week before he started shooting Mid90s. He and Jonze were having dinner, and Jonze said to him, I can tell you're ready, because you're open. He was ready to let the film become whatever it would be. “That made me happy,” Hill says now, “because the more I'm closed off, whether it's in life or in film, the more I feel like I'm fighting against life, instead of just letting it happen.”


Mid90s, he says, is about a lot of things, but one of them is this idea, of allowing yourself to feel, for better or for worse. To be the person you suspect yourself of being. To let it happen. There's this speech given by one of the characters in the film, a skater played by Na-Kel Smith, about being ambitious. He's an amateur who wants to go pro. He wants to be better than he currently is. He doesn't want to apologize for wanting what he wants.

“He's saying, ‘Try hard,’ ” Hill says. “His message is that everyone thinks it's corny to try hard. I think it's cool to try hard. His message is: We're all fucked up. Let's just be here together. Let's go skate.”

Zach Baron is GQ's staff writer.

This story originally appeared in the December 2018/January 2019 issue with the title "Jonah's Arc."

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