We are six weeks away from the release of Devotion, the historical aviation epic starring Glen Powell and Jonathan Majors, which means we’re entering the full-court press phase of promotion. They’ve already been to TIFF—where Powell and Majors charmed Lainey—for the world premiere. Now, Jonathan Majors covers Men’s Health to talk acting, his workout routine, Marvel, and Devotion. The interview is, um…
In the interview, conducted by Clover Hope, Majors comes across as pretty humble, and though he is not On The Internet himself, he is aware via friends and family of the internet’s extreme thirst for him, and he doesn’t seem 100% comfortable with it, saying “I also mostly wear hoodies when I’m out. I stay covered up.” So let us just say, then, that Men’s Health is doing Eros’s work with this photo spread and leave it at that.
Majors is one of a small cohort of actors who should have broken out a few years ago, but the pandemic got in the way (Ana de Armas is another). Now, though, his time is nigh, with Devotion being the superhero counter-programming for the Thanksgiving holiday in the US (a major film-going weekend), and his official debut as Kang the Conqueror coming in early 2023 with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (he’s already played a one-off version of the character in Loki). Majors is ready to level up, you can tell. He’s got that honed intensity that comes when smart actors know the biggest break is right in front of them, and they just have to not f-ck it up.
He also engages in one of my newer interests in celebrity profiles, which is when intense, Method-style actors talk about Method acting without trying to feed the predominant impression that “Method acting” is code for “on-set asshole”. Majors, who attended the Yale School of Drama, points out that there are many “Methods” and Lee Strasberg’s Method, the most popular, is just one. He is “mindful of his energy while filming” but will also do “whatever it takes”. All that is reported in this profile is that he shows up early to set and hypes himself up with jogging and music, that’s leagues away from Jared Leto-style over the top Methoding.
But the most important part of this profile, besides the part where he poses with his dogs for photos, is when he talks about Glen Powell pitching Devotion to him. They met in a Russian bathhouse and spent five hours in a sauna, talking. Can we just get a movie about this? Like I’m sure Devotion is good and all, and it is an Important Story, but can we also have a movie about Glen Powell and Jonathan Majors hanging out in a bathhouse? My Sauna with Jonathan, or My Steam Room with Glen. I respect Jonathan Majors is a serious artist who treats his body as key to his performance, and given that he has a number of physical roles lined up, he has worked hard to achieve a certain physicality—that “cannot be bought”, according to him—but I ALSO think there should be a movie just about Glen Powell and Jonathan Majors in a sauna, and this, too, is ART.
