The acclaimed film star John C Reilly is bringing a vaudevillian performance of love songs by the likes of Johnny Mercer and Tom Waits and Irving Berlin to Ireland next week. He performs them in the guise of a slightly ruffled man named Mister Romantic, who emerges at the start of each performance from a steamer trunk. It’s beautiful stuff.
There has always been something vaudevillian in Reilly’s acting, most obviously in his turn as Oliver Hardy in the film Stan & Ollie, from 2018 (for which he and Steve Coogan learned full Laurel and Hardy routines), but also in his double act with Will Ferrell in Step Brothers and Talladega Nights, and in his role as the bizarre TV doctor Steve Brule in the TV show Check it Out! with Dr Steve Brule.
He started performing in musicals when he was about eight because “no one was doing Shakespeare or Ibsen or David Mamet in my neighbourhood on the south side of Chicago”, but when he first went to study at the theatre school at DePaul University in the city he wanted to be “Robert De Niro or Al Pacino or Gene Hackman”.
Musicals weren’t what serious actors did, he says. Then he was offered the role of Amos Hart in the 2002 film version of Chicago, alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renée Zellweger, “and I realised that not only is this a valid art form, but I’m good at it and I have these skills that I’ve built my whole life. Why would I turn my back on that?
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“I also realised at that moment that the modern musical is an American invention. You can argue that opera and classical music were invented in Europe, but jazz and the American musical are really the only two art forms that we really originated here, you know?”
He looks bashful for a moment. “So that was just kind of a little appreciation of America there.”
Reilly is not hugely optimistic about the United States right now. Mister Romantic “was born from a place of despair and joy”, he says. “Because I read the news. I’m as worried as anybody about the way things are going. And I thought, well, what can I actually do? What would make me feel better, in terms of direct action that I could do to counteract this anti-empathy thing that’s happening in the world?
“And I thought, Well, I’ve never been really good at making political statements, and in fact I don’t think entertainers’ political opinions really matter very much to the public at large, but I can sing, I can dance, I can tell jokes, I can tell people I love them ...
“To me the biggest mission of the show is to show people we can connect with each other ... There’s this overall kind of meta-mission to the show, which is to spread love and kindness and compassion and tolerance and empathy.”
Reilly put a band of Grammy-winning musicians together and practised. “And then when I did the first show, about three years ago, I didn’t really have any plan other than I want to come out of a steamer trunk.” He laughs. “I don’t even know why I wanted to do that, but I thought I should come in in a steamer trunk.
“Literally the night before the show I was, like, ‘Why would I be in a steamer trunk? How am I going to explain that?’ And I thought, Well, maybe you’re just always in the steamer trunk, and you come out only for these shows, and you don’t remember what happened.”
Mr Romantic “is trying to fall in love with someone every show, and he fails every time. And so then I just improvised all the rest of it, all the dancing, all the joking around, all the pantomime bits that I do during the music solos.”
At college Reilly was very influenced by Paul Sills, the improv guru who was one of the founders of Chicago’s renowned Second City troupe, and Sills’s mother, Viola Spolin.
“She wrote a book called Theater Games, which is the bible for improv,” he says. “It precedes everyone else. She started teaching kind of latchkey kids in Los Angeles, little kids, these different games. And she turned it into this whole way to see acting.
“I think it was just something I naturally did as a kid. But I didn’t recognise it as improvising. I was into plays and Dungeons & Dragons. I understood crossing into the looking glass at an early age. It wasn’t until I got into college, when I met this amazing professor, Patrick Murphy, who’s still my closest friend, that I realised, ‘Oh, this is a thing. There are certain rules to it, and there’s certain ways to get better at it.’”
Improv has been at the heart of Reilly’s work ever since. The moving trajectory of Jim Kurring, the character he plays in Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 film, originally came from running around Los Angeles in a police costume, improvising scenes while Anderson followed him with a camera.
“We were bored, and we couldn’t get his movies made and we were just struggling to just make it through the summer,” Reilly says. “There was no point to it other than Paul and I bored and wanting to make each other laugh and have fun, and Paul wanting to direct and have a camera in his hands and do what he dreamed of doing.
“We were trying to get the money together for Boogie Nights, and it wasn’t going anywhere. We weren’t trying to please an audience. We weren’t trying to use it to get somewhere else. We weren’t trying to create a character for a movie. We were literally just f**king around and running around the streets of LA, calling up actor friends of ours just to goof around. Paul took all those video tapes eventually and turned them into the character for Magnolia.”
Reilly and Coogan also improvised a key sequence in Stan & Ollie. “Their big falling-out scene was written in this way that didn’t quite feel like performers would talk to each other,” he says.
“I said, ‘Steve, we owe it to these guys to put the words that they might have said to each other, and you and I both understand what it’s like to be a partner in a double act ... We understand that kind of bond and that marriage. So what would you say to really hurt my feelings, Steve?’
“And he was, like, ‘You’re a lazy, fat ass.’ He’s, like, ‘All right, your turn.’ And I was, like, ‘You’re hollow. You’re a hollow man. There’s nothing in there.’ And those things end up in the script.”
There’s a lot of improvisation in Steve Brule too. Reilly and the American comedy duo of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, with whom he created the character, “will come up with concepts, but virtually everything in that show Steve improvised”.
Is “Steve” not a part he played? “He is a different entity. He’s not me. I’m not Steve. I’m the executive producer of that show.” He laughs. “Next question!”
There are now two schools in the world of improvisation, Reilly says. “Some people use it in this pure way: it can end up being a scene about someone dying or something violent or sad. And then there’s this other branch that went into pure comedy ... I love that kind of humour, but I think you’re passing by a lot of opportunities if you’re only chasing the laughs.”
Life is a mixture of comedy and drama, he says. “The way I see acting, and the reason you see so much pathos in my funny characters, and the reason you see maybe something a little bit humorous about my more dramatic or serious characters, is because I think that’s the way life is.
“I think that’s the truth about human beings ... Whenever you go to a funeral, someone always cracks a joke. Whenever you go to a birthday party, you check in on people and see, ‘Oh, wow, that person looks sick.’ There are things that temper the moment. That’s the truth about life.”
But some people like to keep comedy and drama entirely separate, right? “Fascists like to separate them – people that say, ‘Don’t get politics involved. Don’t get the true human experience involved. Just make us laugh.’” Reilly sighs. “I’ve been thinking about fascists a lot lately for some reason. I don’t know why.”
Improvisation isn’t for everyone, he says. “I worked with this older Irish actor one time – God rest his soul, he’s not with us any more. He was bummed out if I said anything that wasn’t the lines. He’d be, like, ‘F**king Americans. No respect for the script.’”
Reilly loves Ireland, by the way; he comes here twice a year. He grew up listening to traditional Irish music in Chicago.
“There’s this clip of me in Doolin singing The Wild Rover,” he says about a trip to Co Clare. “It was literally about 10 years ago that someone filmed it, and every time I come back they’re, like, ‘John Reilly seen in Doolin.’” He laughs. “I’ve had so many great interactions with people in pubs” in Ireland. “You’re talking to some guy who has these turns of phrase and these stories, and is telling you about characters from his town, and you’re, like, ‘Are you a poet?’ And he’s, like, ‘No, I’m a dairy farmer.’
“People’s ability to be lyrical and explore language and sing is a beautiful thing. I was going to try and do a little pub tour around Ireland. I’m going to try to talk Cormac Begley into doing it, and maybe Lisa O’Neill. We’ll get up to some high jinks.”
Reilly loves the lack of hierarchy in trad sessions. “The temptation as a singer is to think, I have to sing this beautifully. But David Byrne” – of Talking Heads – “once said that people don’t trust a perfect singer. I use my flaws to my advantage. The flaws and the little idiosyncrasies in the way people sing are what make it unique and special and relatable.
“And I think that goes for my acting, too, by the way. I don’t look like Brad Pitt. I look like maybe the guy that works at the grocery store – which I did for many years. There’s something relatable about it.”
How does Reilly relate acting to singing? “It’s all storytelling.” But “in writing and in any kind of acting you have to go through the audience’s brain first. You have to launch these intellectual ideas. And then, if they agree with them, it might make it to their hearts.
“Music skips the brain altogether and goes straight at the heart ... There’s something alchemical about the sounds themselves, the notes, the arrangement of the notes. There’s just something so powerful and so direct about it ...
“I end up crying every show. Someone asked me afterwards, ‘Were you really crying or was that an act?’ Of course I was crying!” Reilly laughs. “It’s kind of troublesome, actually, because it’s very hard to sing well when you’re crying.”
What does he get out of singing? “I suffer from depression here and there,” he says. “I go through waves of depression, like literally chemical depression. And what singing often does for me is pull out of those dark places. I think it’s literally the vibration of your vocal cords themselves, creating these vibrations in your body that heal you.
“In fact, the morning I went in to record this album” – What’s Not to Love?, which accompanies Mister Romantic – “I was having a breakdown almost. Maybe it had to do with finding the courage to actually sing on a recording, but I thought, Just start singing, just start doing it, you’ll come around. And, sure enough, that vibration really is almost like a massage for your soul ... You’re not tethered to the world any more. You’re part of some larger spiritual universe.”
Reilly knows it’s unusual to be drawn to these earlier forms of performance and art musicals, vaudeville, the American songbook. He gestures to a figurine of Oliver Hardy on a shelf behind him.
“If you ask me, ‘Why were you drawn to vaudevillian-style performing? Why are you drawn to that kind of heart-on-your-sleeve, obligated-to-the-audience kind of performance?’ it’s because I see myself as a clown.
“I’ve done movies with great dramatic actors – Daniel Day-Lewis, Joaquin Phoenix, Sean Penn – and I’ve even said to some of those guys, ‘Look, I’m a circus performer. You’re concerned with staying in this place that’s so real that you just can’t escape it. To me acting is collaboration and play. What can we find here?’”
Does he really see himself as a clown? “To me a clown is a priest. You’re dedicated to the spirituality and the betterment and the joy of the human race, but you’re alone in it.
“That’s the same with an actor doing a play on stage. It’s like a Mass. The lights come down. You try to arrive at some place together, and then you say goodbye and that actor goes back home, prepares for the next day, tries to rest.
“About halfway through lunch the next day he loses his appetite and realises, ‘Oh, God, I’ve got to do this show again tonight.’” He laughs. “That’s a monk’s life to me.”
John C Reilly performs Mister Romantic at the Ambassador Theatre, Dublin, on Thursday, November 20th
