Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the first to admit he’s had it pretty
good. He has had a wildly successful acting career on stages and screens
spanning over three decades. He sings, dances, writes and directs, and he does
a decent Nirvana cover. He has a wife and two kids and he hardly seems to age.
اضافة اعلان
But in his new dramatic comedy series, “Mr. Corman,” he plays a
game of “What if?”
What if he hadn’t been so fortunate?
What if he had been passed over instead of landing a breakout
role as an alien boy on the beloved NBC sitcom “3rd Rock From the Sun”? What if
he had grown up with only one parent, or his anxiety — a frequent but not
debilitating challenge — had been a little worse?
“I’m really lucky to be me,” said Gordon-Levitt, who created,
directed and stars in the new series, which premieres Aug. 6 on Apple TV+.
“Lots of people work really hard and haven’t reaped my rewards.”
Now, at age 40, he seems determined with “Mr. Corman” to reflect
upon that luck — to take stock of his own accomplishments, his own
anxieties and even his own unfulfilled dreams. (They do exist.) It is the most personal
project of his career, he said, “a culmination of everything I learned in my
life about making art and telling stories.”
Call it a twist on middle-age artistic musing that could only
come from a grown-up Hollywood wunderkind who never peaked — an existential
search for what might not have been
as a path to deeper meaning.
The 10-episode series, which follows his on-screen alter ego’s
struggles with adulthood and disappointment, is less a plot-driven hero’s
journey than an exploration of his character’s psyche — and by extension, his
own. Like Gordon-Levitt, his character, Josh Corman, cherishes an unfulfilled
ambition of becoming a rock star. (Gordon-Levitt himself sings and plays
guitar.) Unlike Gordon-Levitt, Josh has failed thus far to accomplish his
dreams, having given up on music to become a fifth grade public-school teacher.
Josh has also failed to launch in other ways. After his fiancée
leaves him, he ends up living with his high school buddy Victor (Arturo
Castro). And Josh has another companion, whose presence Gordon-Levitt takes
pains to highlight without stigmatizing: deep-seated anxiety that occasionally
leaves him panicked and gasping for breath.
While some aspects of Josh’s life are drastic departures from
his creator’s — for starters, Gordon-Levitt has been married for six years, and
had two supportive parents — the character’s mental health struggles weren’t
hard for Gordon-Levitt to channel. He acknowledged that while he does not have
a clinical anxiety disorder, he struggles often with “my brain going around in
circles, feeling bad about myself.”
In other words, it’s no accident that Josh Corman —
Gordon-Levitt’s first regular role on a scripted TV series in two decades — and
Joseph Gordon have such similar sounding names.
“When I’m playing Josh, I don’t have to think about what to do,”
he said in a recent video call from New Zealand, where he had been living with
his family since October. “I know.”
LIKE HIS CHARACTER IN “MR. CORMAN,” Gordon-Levitt
grew up in the San Fernando Valley, in Los Angeles. But their timelines quickly
diverge from there. Gordon-Levitt was a child star, having landed almost two
dozen films and TV roles before his big break on “3rd Rock,” in 1996. Among
them, he played the orphan whose prayers help his favorite team win a pennant
in the 1994 Disney film “Angels in the Outfield.”
But even then, he wasn’t interested only in being in front of
the camera. On sets, he was intrigued by what every member of the crew was
doing.
“Whether they were matching the props, or they were setting up
the lights or the camera, I was fascinated with the whole process,” he said.
Acting ultimately won his heart: From 2007 to 2016, he was part
of at least one favorably reviewed film every year, including scene-stealing
performances as Leonardo DiCaprio’s right-hand man in Christopher Nolan’s
visually arresting “Inception” and as a young contract killer in Rian Johnson’s
2012 time-traveling epic, “Looper.”
His collaborators are among Hollywood’s biggest heavyweights:
Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, Robert Zemeckis. He added Aaron Sorkin to the
list last year by playing the conflicted young prosecutor in “The Trial of the
Chicago 7.”
“I’ve since become more
collaborative,” he said. “One thing I’ve noticed great directors have in common
is the ability to balance their own vision with input from others.”
While he tended toward careful calibration of each moment in
“Don Jon,” choreographing tightly the length of each pause, he wanted to open
the door to spontaneity for “Mr. Corman.”
So, on the new series he made the takes longer, letting the
actors breathe and improvise.
“We have far fewer cuts in ‘Mr. Corman’ than most shows and
movies,” Gordon-Levitt said. “And part of that is wanting to really make it an
actors-forward show.”
He asked for suggestions. He didn’t fret if things didn’t turn
out exactly how he had planned. Like, say, when a pandemic shut down production
just three weeks into shooting in Los Angeles.
But he worked quickly with producers to come up with a solution:
relocating the Valley about 7,000 miles southwest to
New Zealand, where
coronavirus cases were low and where the government had opened its borders to
some international filmmakers and actors.
“At first, I thought he was joking,” said Debra Winger, who
plays his mother on the show and dances with him across a rooftop in a “La La
Land”-like song and dance number he co-wrote with Nathan Johnson for Episode 3.
“But then I realized he meant it. So I threw up one arm and said, ‘Adventure!’
”
aOn the subject of mental health, it was important to
Gordon-Levitt that “Mr. Corman” treat Josh’s anxiety with complexity and
compassion — starting with the recognition that anxiety doesn’t always care
about success or upbringing.
“We wanted to normalize it and show a guy who has a relatively
secure and safe life, and yet here he is wrestling with anxiety,” he said,
adding: “That’s normal. And if you relate, it’s not because you’re weird or
broken or that you ought to be ashamed.”
The show was also an opportunity for him to present a more
complex picture of Valley life, particularly by showcasing Latino stories —
like that of Castro’s character, a divorced young father — in an authentic way.
The fourth episode (“Mr. Morales”) is devoted almost entirely to Castro’s
character and is one of two in the series that Aurora Guerrero, a Chicana
filmmaker from California, directed.
“The approach to that was subverting what we tend to see in the
mainstream when it comes to Latino characters — a white male lead with a
character of color as a sidekick,” she said. “It’s a slice of life. He’s a
divorcé and a father, and he’s struggling to understand his daughter.”
Castro put it this way: “The character just happens to be Latin.
But that doesn’t define his experience in life. It’s just who he is.”
GIVEN THE PROMINENCE of anxiety,
loneliness and unfulfilled dreams in Mr. Corman’s story, this might be a good
place for a reminder that “Mr. Corman” is, at its heart, a comedy. Amid the
angst in “Mr. Corman,” there is creativity. Amid the disappointment, humor.
“I want people to enjoy themselves and laugh while they watch
the show,” Gordon-Levitt said.
And there is joy: Chalk it up to the show’s inspiration, which,
as Gordon-Levitt explained, wasn’t having gotten lost in some dark wood of the
soul as he approached middle age. It was his elation at becoming a father in
2015, which spurred both gratitude and self-searching — the “what ifs.”
“I felt so, so lucky,” he said, adding: “I realized, I’m the
adult now. “I wasn’t looking ahead any longer. It was like, I’m
here.”
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