‘K?ln 75’ Star John Magaro on Being “a Working Class Actor,” Owing So Much to James Gandolfini
John Magaro is the kind of actor you discover, like a personal secret. Maybe he first caught your eye in The Big Short, as the geeky stand out among a pack of slick, self-interested traders; grabbed you as Yael Stone’s dreamy prison pen pal in Orange Is the New Black love story, or won you over as Arthur, in Celine Song’s Past Lives, as the husband on the outside looking in as his wife Nora (Greta Lee) reunites and rekindles with her childhood friend from Korea. I first spotted him playing a New Jersey drummer desperate to make it big in David Chase’s Not Fade Away (2012), but my come-to-Magaro moment was his performance as Cookie in Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow. His quietly devastating depiction of male friendship and quiet yearning was the on-screen standout of 2019.
More recently, Magaro has been getting attention for Oscar contender September 5, where he plays a U.S. television producer caught up in the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and in a rare mainstream role, as CIA case officer Owen Taylor in Showtime’s spy series The Agency.
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“But I still primarily function within indie filmmaking,” says Magaro, speaking via Zoom from his house in New York, noting the journey from obscurity to almost-fame been a “slow climb.” Coming off of Sundance, where he won rave reviews for his taciturn turn in Cole Webley’s Omaha, as a father struggling to keep his life and family together amid the 2008 recession, Magaro is heading to the Berlin Film Festival with K?ln 75, a German drama from director Ido Fluk (The Ticket). Magaro plays legendary jazz musician Keith Jarrett as he prepares for his famous, entirely improvised concert in Cologne in 1975. The recording of the concert would become the best-selling solo jazz album of all time.
Magaro talked to THR about his latest role, his special bond with Kelly Reichardt, and how big an influence James Gandolfini has been on him.
Were you a jazz head before you got offered this role?
I knew earlier stuff, Chet Baker, Thelonious Monk, that kind of jazz, I knew, but, but I didn’t really know about the beginnings of modern jazz and what Keith Jarrett was doing. So it was really an education for me. And luckily, I had a lot of time, you know, I was attached to the movie for some time before we actually got financed and before we were able to go. So I had time to explore his work, read a few biographies about him, and, bring myself up to speed.
Watching K?ln 75, I was reminded of the first time I saw you on screen, playing another musician, the unsuccessful drummer in David Chase’s Not Fade Away (2012).
Yeah, and I learned another instrument for this one. I learned drums for Not Fade Away. I learned piano for this.
Jarrett was famous for his entirely improvised performances — including the legendary K?ln 75 concert. How do you prepare to imitate complete spontaneity?
Well, it was clear I was never, ever, going to be able to get to Keith Jarrett’s level. I studied a lot of his mannerisms, and watched a lot of tapes, in particular, his Norway concerts of ’72 and ’73 just to examine his style of playing. I worked with my my piano teacher, Scott Gentile, who we really tried to break down his style and what he was doing. And we realized that so much about his process, at least we believe so, was to free himself from nerves, to free himself from rigidness. So much of his weird style of his back and his arms, we realized, was to free himself up so he had access to complete improvisation. So that was the conscious decision in how I approached the piano playing. But the actual plunking out of the keys was extremely technical, you know, paint by numbers. So the fingers are precise, and then the body is much more free in the Keith Jarrett sense of the word.
Can you relate to Keith Jarrett’s career as an artist, compared to your own in acting?
They don’t really compare. He is a true prodigy. He was dedicated from the start. I dabbled in community theater when I was young, but his brother told me a story that Keith left high school to go tour on the road with a jazz band while he was still a teenager. He was a professional at such a young age. I guess we’re both creative in a way, but it’s a very different thing being a working actor and doing something so technical as being a virtuoso pianist.
I’ve always considered myself a kind of a journeyman actor, a working-class actor. I’m kind of known now, I’m in this Showtime series The Agency, but I still primarily function within indie filmmaking. It’s hard work and it’s been a very slow ladder climb to get recognition. Keith Jarrett was so revered at such a young age, he stuck out right away. I guess the only thing you can say is maybe jazz and indie film are both niche art forms. But Keith was so ahead of the game. I’m 41 now. By the time he was 41 he was already at the highest level of jazz of his art form.
Don’t you think you’ve arrived, now? You’ve been in some of the most acclaimed indie films of the last decade.
It’s still a slow climb. It’s still, as you said, indie filmmaking, and there’s a small world that watches those. I’d say I’m probably more recognized for Orange is the New Black than First Cow, if I’m recognized at all. I’m not doing Marvel movies, I’m not doing these kinds of smaller things. The scripts I get sent are primarily indie films, the kind that don’t have financing, where they are struggling to get made. Like this one, which I came on a few years ago. But I still feel very lucky. When I graduated college, I thought I’d be a regional theater actor. I thought that’s where my destiny lay. I kind of fell into film and have really found a love for it, especially independent film, because there’s so much passion there, just so much heart. Even when I’ve worked in the studio realm, I’ve had the good fortune to work with directors who are really passionate in the same way, because most of them came from indie cinema. I mean, I just finished The Bride with Maggie Gyllenhaal, and although it’s a huge studio movie, the same passion exists in her as Ido had with this film.
Do you pick your roles based on the directors? You seem to have a symbiotic relationship with Kelly Reichardt.
Yeah, I think we’re very like-minded. She’s my buddy. We’ve really bonded. I love working with her. She knows I’ll be there whenever, whatever she asks to do on set. I told her: I’ll hold sandwiches for you, whatever needs to be done. I just so respect her as a filmmaker. She just has a clear point of view, and she’s bold and she’s audacious, and she’s willing to take a risk, and she knows who she is. She’s just true to herself, and that’s the best kind of artist.
She’s also just able to just draw things out of me very easily, performances that I might not see in myself. She really knows how to push me in directions that are unexpected but do so in a very simple way. We have a shorthand, a very easy communication. It’s something you hope for as an actor to find in a director, and I’ve had the good fortune to find it in probably one of the best directors out there. I feel extremely lucky to be in her orbit.
But to answer your question, no, I primarily pick according to the script. With Kelly, I always know it’s going to be a good script, so that helps. But the first thing is the script. Ido had done one other film before and a very different type of film. The director of the film I was just with at Sundance, Omaha [Cole Webley], that’s his first film. [Past Lives director] Celine Song was a first-time director. If a script really resonates with me, really sings to me, it makes it a lot easier to say yes. If you have a first-time director, untested beyond the script, you of course then have to have a conversation with them to see who else is involved, etc. But the initial thing that gets me interested is the words on the page.
Do you also choose roles that show different ways of being a man on screen? It seems your characters — Cookie in First Cow, Arthur in Past Lives, Keith Jarrett here — are deliberate attempts to question or undermine accepted forms of masculinity, what some would call toxic masculinity.
It’s something I’m very interested in, and I’ve had the good fortune to be able to explore that in my work. The film that I just brought to Sundance, Omaha, is another exploration of that, especially looking at the blue-collar, middle-American idea of the strong, silent type in masculinity. I think men, and in particular white men, who have had so much privilege in throughout history, should really be examining what it means to be a man. Now that I’m a father of a young daughter who’s going to be five very soon, I feel the need to explore what it means to be a man, what it means to be “masculine” with big quotation marks. I think that we have a responsibility to ask those questions and explore it. We’re living in an era where now we’re finally understanding what toxic masculinity is. So I think it would be silly to not explore those questions, and I feel very fortunate that in my body of work, I’ve been able to to explore what it means.
Was James Gandolfini an influence there, who played your father in Don’t Fade Away? I’ve always found his work to be an evisceration of the traditional myths of masculinity.
Jim is one of the biggest influences on me as an actor. He taught me so much. We had the good fortune of working twice together [on Not Fade Away and 2011’s Down The Shore] and I’ve worked with his son Michael twice: On the first film with Jim and then on The Many Saints of Newark, also from David Chase. My acting coach [the late] Harold Guskin was also Jim’s acting coach. I now work with Harold’s wife, Sandra Jennings. Jim is probably my biggest influence as an actor and David Chase is a mentor and father figure to me. I think viewers who watch The Sopranos often misunderstand what Tony Soprano and the show is about, they tend to glorify the gangsters, whereas David and Jim were never attempting to glorify it. They were attempting to analyze this horrible, toxic culture. If you look at it for what it really is, and what David was trying to do, it’s actually quite subversive to the gangster genre. There was a time on Not Fade Away where Jim and I were shooting a scene at a restaurant, and he really pushed me as a young actor. It’s something I learned from and that I still apply. I was so fortunate to get Not Fade Away. It came at a pivotal moment in my career and it really changed my style and trajectory as an actor. I owe so much of that to the great late Jim Gandolfini.
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