Time Magazine: Monday, September 26, 2011.
Yes, of course Joseph Gordon-Levitt would like to sing a song. Or dance. Or take photos. Or listen to your song and watch you dance while he takes photos. He’ll sing “La Bamba” just because a radio DJ asks him to. He’ll do an impersonation of Seth Rogen just because I ask him to. He treats life as if it’s one big freshman dorm room. (See the crowdsourced version of this profile.)
There’s a lightness to Gordon-Levitt, or JGL, as his online fans often call him. He had it in Inception, bouncing gravity-free off ceilings and walls, and in (500) Days of Summer, as he danced to Hall and Oates’ “You Make My Dreams” with an entire city in a way that would have impressed Ferris Bueller. He can even bring levity to cancer, in the dramedy 50/50 (out Sept. 30), in which he plays a 27-year-old dealing with chemo, an overprotective mom and Rogen as a best friend who figures out that looking after a sick buddy is a great way to get women to sleep with him.
Every generation needs an accessible American everyman, but in the Internet age, the job description requires actual accessibility and off-camera everyman-ness. Which looks exhausting. Except when JGL does it. Drinking a beer in the little recording studio of his Los Angeles home, JGL, 30, eagerly explains how he and his brother “Burning Dan,” a professional fire dancer, started the new-media production company hitRECord in 2005. At hitRECord.org tens of thousands of people contribute music, film, poetry, photography, drawings and short stories, then freely remix one another’s work. It’s as if all the shy, quirky 20-something girls and the boys who love them took an art class together.
Once a month or so, JGL puts on live shows promoting hitRECord, opening with an anti-antipiracy call to arms: “Please turn all recording devices on.” People take the stage to perform their work, and JGL sings (covers of Lady Gaga and Nirvana), plays guitar, gets behind a drum kit, reads poetry and sometimes talks in French. Girls tend to like this. He’s educated, multitalented, self-expressive and risk-taking. He’s like James Franco, if James Franco weren’t so weird. And like Franco, JGL is an indie-identified actor who’s doing a lot of un-indie films: next year he’s cast alongside Bruce Willis in the time-travel thriller Looper, as a cop in The Dark Knight Rises and as the President’s son in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln.
JGL’s earnest cuteness is partly a holdover from his time as a child actor, playing an adult alien in a kid’s body on the NBC sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun for six seasons, until 2001. After that he went to Columbia University, where he started shooting short films; he dropped out in 2004. “What really killed it was when I got Final Cut Pro,” he says. “I thought, I could be at home studying for this class, or I could be at home editing a video.”
Since playing a gay prostitute in Mysterious Skin (2004) and a high school murder investigator in Brick (2005), he has become the indie-film star wistful teen girls most want to cuddle — especially after his performance as a pining Romeo in (500) Days of Summer. “Girls idolize this guy, but he’s totally selfish,” JGL says of his Summer character. “He puts this girl on a pedestal. He doesn’t even learn that much about her.” (JGL worries about this precisely because he’s the kind of sensitive, thoughtful guy wistful teen girls think he is.)
He didn’t feel the same ambivalence about Adam, the emasculated Seattle public-radio producer he plays in 50/50, even though it was a difficult role to jump into. JGL not only had to sub at the last minute for James McAvoy (who left midshoot because of a family emergency) but also had to shave his head on camera in one take. 50/50 is based on the real-life cancer ordeal of the movie’s writer, Will Reiser. Rogen, who plays the caretaking friend, was Reiser’s caretaking friend in real life too. “He could not be more opposite of the character he plays in the movie,” says Rogen of JGL. “But even though he’s concealing his real personality, the fact that he’s a great person still comes across.”
JGL doesn’t conceal much of anything at the hitRECord site. Last October his brother died, reportedly of a drug overdose. The next day, JGL posted a statement about his brother’s death on hitRECord, encouraging members to make tribute videos and songs about Burning Dan. Hundreds did. “I didn’t have the heart to go through all of them — but a lot of them, most of them actually,” JGL says. “HitRECord is a really personal thing, and it was me and him. I know if you told him, ‘Hey, dude, when you die, you are going to have people all over the world singing in harmony about you,’ he would love that.”
One of the songs about his brother is on RECollection Vol. 1, hitRECord’s first multimedia anthology — a $30, 64-page book with a DVD and a CD, featuring contributions from 471 people. The company splits profits with the contributors (handing out $50,000 last year), which means JGL’s dad, who acts as his CFO, is going to be writing a lot of tiny checks — assuming JGL can cover the nearly $90,000 he put up to make the anthologies.
In the near future, JGL believes, this mode of self-publishing will be more profitable than starring in studio films. “The status quo benefits the middleman, the executives, not the actual artists,” he says. “This is our generation’s task, to figure out how to connect directly with our audience and support ourselves with the art we make.”
One of the website’s latest projects is to make a better version of this article. JGL recorded an hour of our interview and posted it on hitRECord. Five days later, more than 70 people had used it to write their own JGL profiles. JGL may have figured out a new way to create art, but more important, I’ve figured out a new way to get other people to do my work for me. It really is hard not to like this guy.
See a crowdsourced, hitRECord-style version of this profile at time.com/jgl
