Nick Jonas on Playing a ‘Loose Version’ of Himself in John Carney’s ‘Power Ballad’ and the Lasting Success of His Disney ‘Graduating Class’
Nick Jonas is currently at the Red Sea Film Festival, where his wife Priyanka Chopra Jonas is set to receive an honor at the closing ceremony, but until very recently the actor was in Dublin shooting John Carney’s “Power Ballad” alongside Paul Rudd. The project, described as a story revolving around a conflict between a rock star and a wedding singer, provided Jonas with the chance to draw from his own experiences as a musician to build the character of Danny Wilson.
Speaking with Variety from Jeddah, Jonas says he has long been a fan of Carney’s and that he first got an email around two years ago saying that the director was putting the film together and his name came up for the role. “I was so excited,” he says. “A year and a half later, John wanted to hop on a Zoom to talk and we hit it off right away.”
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Jonas says the fictional “Power Ballad” rock star is a “loose version” of himself. “Danny is someone who has come from a band, is becoming a solo artist and making that transition,” Jonas says. “Luckily, I had a lot of real-life experience to pull from.”
“He is dealing with a lot of the pitfalls that I was fortunate enough to circumnavigate by way of being very close with my family,” he continues. “Having a tight-knit inner circle that hasn’t changed over the years has helped me get through relatively unscathed, but I was able to look at some of my peers over the years, see what some of those pitfalls were and draw on those experiences.”
Does Jonas feel intimidated to thread those lines between the personal and the fictional so closely? Not really, he says, as he is “someone who tries very hard to live a private life amidst a very public life.”
“As social media has grown in the last 15 years, feeling the need to share more of your life online has been something I’ve wrestled with,” he adds. “It’s about finding that balance of how much is enough to engage the audience and feel connected to my fans while also being in a place where I don’t feel like I am living my life on display.”
Talking about living a life on display, Jonas quite literally married the superstardom of the Jonas Brothers with the Beatlemania-like obsession of Bollywood when he wed Indian superstar Priyanka Chopra Jonas in 2018. “The important thing to remember as a person living a public life is how you use these tools that make a very big world that much smaller,” he says.
“‘My audience in India, for instance, has grown exponentially with Instagram over the last couple of years and I felt a real connection to that part of the world that I didn’t have prior to my relationship,” he highlights. “That has now extended even into music, film and the art I’ve been exposed to.”
Later in the day, Jonas gave a wide-spanning talk on his career, where he spoke about his time at Disney and the lasting success of his generation — including Demi Lovato, Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez. The actor said he’s seen the news about Gomez’s first Golden Globe nomination for “Emilia Pérez” and that it is a “tremendous thing” to have his Disney peers receive such accolades. “I think that’s a real testament to Disney’s ability to find and foster talent and understand what makes someone unique while finding a way to make it work within their ecosystem.”
“I absolutely look back at [Disney] as a creative school,” he said. “It was also school, to be honest. I was between the ages of 14 and 18, which is my high school years. That graduating class of Miley, Selena and Demi, it was all of us coming up together and you can see, frankly, the length of our careers and the success we’ve all been able to have.”
Still, the mind-boggling fame the actor acquired with Disney and the band didn’t always prove a positive. Once the Jonas Brothers broke up in 2013, Nick pursued roles in film and television but had several doors shut in his face. When he first asked to audition for 2014’s “Kingdom,” his agent said that the creatives behind the show “weren’t going to see a Jonas Brother for the role.”
“This was not the first time I’d heard this feedback,” he mentioned. “There were projects I went after where the feedback was, ‘There was no way they were going to take a chance on casting you.’ That was really discouraging.”
But onto better things: the actor is set to return to Broadway in 2025 alongside Tony-winning actor Adrienne Warren in Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years.” This is Jonas’ first non-Brothers Broadway outing in 12 years. “One of the things I’m most looking forward to is being around a community of people who share that same passion,” he said. “That is the beauty of this art form — you really find your people.”
“It comes with a little bit of pressure,” he said of taking on the role of Jamie in the acclaimed musical. “But the good nerves, the ones where you feel butterflies, are exciting to me. I’ve spent a week back in New York working on the material with Jason, who is so wonderful to work with and almost surgical about every note, and when you wrap your head around all of the intricacies of his work it just gets even more fun to play in that sandbox.”
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