Luckily, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is good at his job. His yearning to do good work — work that’s totally off-the wall and totally his own — has led him down some pretty formidable paths, even within the confines of traditional Hollywood movie-making. He favours directors with a collaborative spirit and with something to say because, as he puts it, “the medium of movies belongs to the director. Whenever I’ve had the opportunity to work with a director I admire, I’ve jumped at the chance.”
That list includes Rian Johnson (Looper), Christopher Nolan (Interstellar) and Steven Spielberg (Lincoln). And it includes himself, with 2013’s Don Jon, a movie about love and porn addiction that he wrote, directed and starred in.
Put another way: Joseph Gordon-Levitt makes being a movie star look fucking easy.
For an even clearer picture, look at Gordon-Levitt’s slated big-screen releases for the rest of 2015. First, there’s The Walk, a Robert Zemeckis-directed 3-D blockbuster about Philippe Petit, the man who famously tight-roped between the World Trade Centre’s twin towers in 1974. Then there’s Snowden, an Oliver Stone-directed biopic of the infamous whistleblower Edward Snowden. And then there’s The Night Before, an Evan Goldberg-written, Jonathan Levine-directed stoner comedy co-starring Seth Rogen and Anthony Mackie, about a group of dudes who get fucked up and into trouble on the night before Christmas.
There it all is, laid out in advance-sale ticket stubs: a trilogy of movies so disparate in tone, style and perceived audience it’s hard to believe they have any unifying presence. They’re a trio of movies that showcase Gordon-Levitt’s unique ageless quality, his unnerving blend of borderline camp big-Hollywood nostalgia (The Walk), old man seriousness (Snowden) and boyish slacker charm (The Night Before). These are the tenets of a modern movie star — the three pillars upon which fame can be not only achieved, but kindly so.
Looper
Or put another way: Joseph Gordon-Levitt makes being a movie star look fucking easy. Yes, it’s true, the man has had almost three decades of practice, having been in commercials since he was six and having anchored a Disney feature, Angels in the Outfield, at 13. But he also seems to genuinely espouse the one intangible thing audiences are looking for, and that other actors seem desperately trying to fake: “I love my job,” he says, emphasizing the word love just barely, just in that way that only people telling the truth can do. He might be a quiet guy, a thinker, a serious man. But he’s doing the work he wants to do. And he’s having a damn good time doing it.
Where his contemporaries might feel compelled to spend off nights playing games with Jimmy Fallon — a curse under which he’s not immune, having helped propel Lip Sync Battle into the mainstream with his renditions of Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass” — Gordon-Levitt comes by that all-business-all-fun dichotomy naturally. He’s already see-through, already known, already old and young, self-serious and self-effacing.
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“I don’t think the future is any one thing,” say Gordon-Levitt. He’s talking about the future of media, denying the idea that sites like hitRECord will be the only way people consume cultural products five or 10 or 25 years from now. And maybe he’s right about that, but only by default. He is, after all, a guy building a quiet online empire for collaboration and creation, while also pursuing an acting career that, as it stands, has him as one of the biggest stars — action, comedy, romantic or otherwise — in the world right now.
So excuse us for believing that if the future of Hollywood was anything — any one thing — it might not be Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but it is fully in his hands. Which is a good thing, since he has that singular talent for holding many disparate things together. It’s like we said: he’s a deeper, ironic thing tucked insidiously inside a seemingly innocent thing.
He’s a writer and director inside an actor, a disrupter insider a rule follower, an old soul inside a young man’s body. He’s timeless, in the truest sense of the word: reverent of the past, concerned with the future and, more than anything, just plain killing it in the here and now. Take it from him: “It’s an incredible time to be alive.”
