By
Jonathan Shia
Photography by
Stanislaw Boniecki

Styling by Alison Mazur. Grooming by Kumi Craig at Starworks Artists. Special thanks to Yasmin Tayag.

JONATHAN GROFF TAKES ON SERIAL KILLERS IN 'MINDHUNTER'


As a key cast member in the record-breaking hit musical Hamilton, Jonathan Groff had every right to enjoy the many afterparties he was invited to following the 2016 Tony Awards. But instead, he spent the night after the show picked up the trophy for Best Musical—along with ten others—sleeping in the car on the way back to Pittsburgh, where he was in the middle of shooting the first season of David Fincher’s new series Mindhunter. “The Tonys were crazy because they were on a Sunday night and we were starting at six AM on Monday morning,” he laughs. “We did ‘The Schuyler Sisters’ after Barbra Streisand announced that we won the Tony and I couldn’t go to the party because I had to get into a car. We drove through the night, they dropped me off at my apartment, I changed my clothes and drove out to set, and started. It was so surreal.”

Now streaming on Netflix, Mindhunter revisits the FBI of the late Seventies during the early days of the Behavioral Science Unit, which attempted to use psychology to understand the mindset of serial killers in order to catch them. Groff plays Holden Ford, based loosely on John E. Douglas, who helped pioneer psychology and criminal profiling as investigative tools and wrote the book on which Mindhunter is based. “We email and I can ask him questions, but he lays it all out in his book,” Groff says of Douglas. “He is very frank and forthcoming about everything, including the emotional toll of talking to these killers—and, even more, talking to the families of the victims. He talks about that sort of depression and the emotional intensity of the whole experience. Yes, the show is about interviewing serial killers and the birth of criminal profiling, but it’s also a character piece about the people who started the Behavioral Science Unit and how talking to these people affected them in their real lives.”

Left: Coat by Acne Studios. Sweatshirt by Calvin Klein. Jeans by Junya Watanabe MAN x Levi's.Right: All clothing by Acne Studios.

The series comes amidst a wave of celebrated crime shows, from True Detective to The Jinx and Making a Murderer, reflecting our age’s fascination with the eternal question of what causes a person to kill another person. In an early episode, Groff’s Holden posits that the turmoil of the era has encouraged a surge of serial killers, although the actor places the show’s murderers on a much longer timeline. “There were always serial killers, like Jack the Ripper, from way long before, but it was almost like the culture was ready to finally look at it then,” he muses. “Coming out of the Fifties and going into the Sixties and Seventies, the culture was finally ready to face the unknown and the FBI finally started to catch up with the times and look at things in less of a black-and-white way and engage with more complicated scenarios. [More recently,] the Las Vegas shooting happened and you go, ‘Fuck, how could someone have done that?’ and that’s the exact question that our show is asking. It’s an endlessly relevant question. There is an unknowable quality to all of it and that is one of the reasons that people keep going back to serial killers, that unfathomable nature of who they are and what they do.”

Groff says he was drawn to project by Fincher, who directed four of the season’s ten episodes and serves as executive producer alongside Charlize Theron. “I would have played any part in anything to work with him,” Groff laughs. “He is so deeply invested and Mindhunter really is his baby. He lived in Pittsburgh with us the entire year and would often show up in the morning even when other people were directing just to be around.”

Left: Coat by Acne Studios. Jacket, worn underneath, by Needles. Trousers by Our Legacy.Right: Sweater by Deveaux. T-shirt by Hanes.
Left: Sweater by Deveaux. T-shirt by Hanes.Right: Coat by Acne Studios. Sweatshirt by Calvin Klein.

Fincher is no stranger to serial killers, having directed Seven and Zodiac, although Mindhunter veers away from the typical violence of the genre and vibrates with a subtler kind of tension. The question here is not how or who, but why. “He said it’s all people in rooms talking,” Groff recalls about Fincher’s pitch. “There’s no action sequences, there’s no gore really. They were trying to not romanticize serial killers, but treat it in a more realistic way. The acts themselves are so horrifying and sensational that just talking about them is horrifying. They didn’t want it to be like torture porn, but just something realistic and what really happened.”

Mindhunter shares that rejection of excess with Groff’s last major television project, the HBO show Looking, which followed a group of young gay men in San Francisco and met with a highly polarized response over the course of two seasons and one final film. “I was surprised by the aggressive negativity,” he says. “It wasn’t just that people didn’t like it, it’s that they relished not liking it. Not everyone, but the negative voices were very loud. Our director was gay, a lot of the actors were gay, all our writers were gay—so it hurts a little extra when you feel like you put your heart and soul into it. Ever since Looking, I go in with my heart a little more protected.”

Jacket and jeans by Acne Studios. T-shirt by Hanes. Sneakers by Common Projects.

This time, the praise has been nearly universal, with rumors of renewal before the first season even premiered. If the series is not yet a phenomenon on the scale of Hamilton, well what is? “I did Spring Awakening,”—his Broadway début, which earned him his first Tony nomination—“in 2007, and that was like every theater dream I ever had as a kid come true. Then to be in Hamilton, which was such a cultural moment—just to be in the walls of the theater while that was happening was fucking insane.”

A highlight of his Tony-nominated run playing the riotously snide and pompous King George III was performing at the White House. “We did an hourlong selection of the show and there’s the First Lady and the President sitting in the audience,” he recalls. “It was just as Obama was about to leave and at the end he got up impromptu and made a speech and was like, ‘Thank you for teaching me how to say goodbye,’”—quoting a song from the show. “Everyone was crying, it was so amazing.”

Groff left Hamilton to being shooting Mindhunter in April 2016, having finished the musical’s initial run Off Broadway at the Public and seen it through its early months on Broadway. He says he doesn’t regret the decision at all, even if, as a child of theater, he admits he missed singing during his year of filming in Pittsburgh. “I had done [Hamilton] for a year by the time I left, so creatively I felt fulfilled with the experience,” he says. “I left before the Tonys so it was bittersweet in that I would’ve liked to take the rest of the ride with the cast, but Mindhunter was so irresistible for so many reasons that it was a no-brainer. Everyone in Hamilton understood and it was sad to say goodbye, but it ultimately felt like the right decision.”

Mindhunter is now streaming on Netflix.

Coat by Acne Studios. Jacket, worn underneath, by Needles.
By
Jonathan Shia
Photography by
Stanislaw Boniecki

Styling by Alison Mazur. Grooming by Kumi Craig at Starworks Artists. Special thanks to Yasmin Tayag.

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