By
Mackenzie Hamilton
Photography by
Stefani Pappas
Styling by
Dianna Lunt

Grooming by Dana Boyer at Art Department. Photographer’s assistant: Philipp Schmidt. Stylist’s assistant: Jonny Nickson. Shot at Slate Studios, New York.

Jonathan Majors Has the Busiest Year in Hollywood


In The Last Black Man In San Francisco, it’s impossible to turn away from the despondency of gentrification. Set in the titular city, long the epicenter of the battle between preservation and growth, the film offers the exceptionally personal story of Jimmie Fails, playing himself in a tale loosely based on his real life, as he goes through the stages of grief after being displaced from his childhood neighborhood. A skateboarder who works part-time at an eldercare facility, Jimmie spends his free time visiting his old home, now owned by a wealthy white couple, and becomes obsessed with the labors of upkeeping it despite their protests. Gorgeous, sweeping, and evocative, the film, director Joe Talbot’s first, premiered at Sundance this year, where it won both the Dramatic Directing Award and the Grand Jury Prize.

In Last Black Man, Jimmie isn’t alone in his mission: Always at his side is his devoted best friend, Montgomery Allen, based on Fails’s real-life friend Prentice and portrayed by the Yale School of Drama graduate Jonathan Majors. At only twenty-nine, Majors has already been studying acting for over a decade, his experience evident in the way he approached the script. “I just fell in love with the characters. I saw in the relationship between the fellas an opportunity to really examine friendship, masculinity, black masculinity, youth, partnership,” he says. “Their friendship is something I think is very ancient—it’s Greek, like Spartans or African warriors. You can see it in every culture, this fraternal bond. It’s biblical in some ways too. There’s a biblical phrase ‘agape’ that I had written on my script a lot, which means ‘unconditional love.’ He has unconditional love, agape love.” After submitting a self-tape, Majors flew to San Francisco for what turned into an intensive fourteen-hour callback with Talbot and Fails where they workshopped the entire movie. “We went to the house,” Majors recalls, “and Joe walked me through the house and I was like, ‘Aww man, I’m pregnant now, you got me!”

Coat by AMI.

There is no one else in San Francisco like Mont—as an artist and playwright, he has an unusual point of view on the world, and although he’s a loner, he’s delighted to share his home with his blind grandfather (played by Danny Glover) as well as Jimmie, who sleeps on the floor next to him in his cramped bedroom. Majors speaks lovingly about developing Mont and it’s easy to see which elements of himself made it into the character. “You figure out what parts of yourself are going to be needed and which parts can relax,” he explains. “As Jonathan, I can relax those parts and other parts will have to work, the parts I’m familiar with, my artistry, my heart, how much I can attach to somebody, and how much I can love somebody.”

What makes the relationship between Jimmie and Mont so extraordinary is the uncommonness of seeing a serious, devoted friendship between two black men in film, both of them blissfully refusing to fit into the world around them. They share a pure love, with each encouraging the other in his idiosyncratic pursuits—Jimmie pushes Mont to complete his play while Mont remains supportive and unjudging of Jimmie’s extraordinary efforts to reclaim his home. Those on the periphery of their lives fail to fully comprehend their motivations and, as people often do, recoil from what they don’t understand. A group of young black men loiter outside of Mont’s grandfather’s home throughout the film, antagonizing each other over their displays of weakness as well as Jimmie and Mont over their friendship, their interests, and their efforts to rebuild the house in San Francisco. “There’s subculture and then there’s the subculture of the subculture,” Majors says. “These aren’t just marginalized men; these are black boys and they are outside of that group. They are not just marginalized black men as, being black men, they are then marginalized again for being a skater and an artist. They’re so far removed, they are outsiders even to the outside group.”

All clothing by Margaret Howell. Watch, worn throughout, talent's own.
Jumpsuit by Westerlind.

Although Jimmie is sometimes bothered, Mont is calmly unaffected by being an outsider and even empathetically tries to strike up a friendship with one of their bullies. It works, for a night, before the bully returns to the crew and falls back into the herd mentality. “That’s toxic masculinity and that’s a part of the story as well—what is it to be a man, what is it to be a black man, what is it to be a friend?” Majors says. “That masculinity is not gender-specific, it’s an energy. Montgomery is a ferocious character, but he’s also a gentleman, and what I was interested in exploring is that gentleness. He’s not a small guy; if he wanted to, he could inflict harm and you see it come out when he gets angry sometimes, but he’s not a fighter.” There are moments when Mont has the option to submit to violence, but he never succumbs. He remains unaffected, directing his energy into empathy, choosing only to be kind. “That doesn’t mean he’s weak,” Majors continues. “He’s still a man even though he’s gentle and quiet and he likes art and he likes fishing and he likes isolation. He loves his buddy, he loves Jimmie—that too is masculine, that type of fraternal love.”

Born and raised around Dallas, Majors wasn’t introduced to acting until he was fourteen after struggling in school. “I had a grandmother who would’ve told you I’m highly emotional, that’s a fact to this day,” he says. “I like words, I like language, I like reading, but I’m also athletic and I can lose my temper. There were a couple things that were going on in the pressure cooker. I was dealing with stuff at home and I got into an altercation that removed me from public school so I was in an alternative education program,” which he describes as a type of boot camp. His teacher there introduced the class to “popcorn reading”—where students are randomly called upon to read from a book—and he discovered how much he enjoyed recreating scenes. “We were reading Agatha Christie and I just got into it,” he recalls. “I grew up reading the Bible all the time and I would compare the King James version and other versions and be like, ‘Oh I like this version better.’ I just loved reading and I have an active imagination and liked acting out the scene.”

All clothing by Lemaire.

Newly inspired, he worked with a series of acting coaches through high school and when it came time for the next step, Majors looked outward. “I study patterns. If you want to be great, you have to see what greatness has done and the road is rough,” he laughs. “You can’t really choose where to go, you don’t really know what to do, but if you see enough people have done certain things you shouldn’t be foolish. For me, I said, ‘I’m going to take that route and give it a go.’” He ended up studying acting at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, whose alumni include Dane DeHaan and Anthony Mackie, before venturing to New York for “a year of life apprenticeship” where he “found the limitations of his instrument” working in regional theater.

Ever disciplined, Majors continued to work with various coaches but began to look to his contemporaries for signs of where he should focus next. “I saw that this Yale school kept popping up and I took a look at that and go ‘I’m going to go there, if that’s what has to be done, I’m going to do what has to be done,'” he says. “I’ll never have to be like I should’ve done this, I should’ve done that. I can put my foot forward and try to get there.” He was accepted into the notoriously competitive three-year MFA program and, before even graduating, was plucked out classes to star in ABC’s docudrama When We Rise, a miniseries about the history of LGBTQ rights advocacy in America. With the school’s blessing (a rare exception), he was able to take time off to film the show. “The audition came up in the first semester in the third year,” when he had five months of school left, he says, offering a dilemma of sorts. “I wanted to complete that pattern and now it was in jeopardy, but for what? An actual job, a real job. It was like, ‘Run son, go do it!'”

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Following his breakout role in When We Rise, Majors’s career quickly flourished. He was cast alongside Christian Bale in Hostiles and in White Boy Rick, directed by Yann Demange and starring Matthew McConaughey, Bel Powley, and Richie Merritt, earning recognition for his portrayal of a gangster with a strong sense of humanity. Later this year, he will have a leading role in JJ Abrams and Jordan Peele’s new HBO show Lovecraft Country, loosely based on the novel by Matt Ruff. Set in the Jim Crow South, the show will mine the horror genre while examining the danger of being black in an openly prejudiced world. “The story will really fuck with your brain,” Majors promises, “in a good way.”

Next year promises to be equally busy, with upcoming roles in Spike Lee’s new film Da 5 Bloods and as Black Panther founder Bobby Seale in Aaron Sorkin’s true-life legal drama The Trial of the Chicago Seven. It’s an envious production list for any actor, but when asked if he feels successful, Majors says no. Pausing for a second, he explains that he feels a sense of calm and a sense of responsibility for the abundance of work and remains dedicated to his craft. “I just pray and hope that my God puts me where I need to be,” he says. “I am following a pattern. I don’t know what the pattern is, but I’m following that pattern full steam ahead. We’ll see how long it goes and what it looks like—hopefully, it goes for a very long time.”

The Last Black Man in San Francisco is out today.

All clothing by AMI.





By
Mackenzie Hamilton
Photography by
Stefani Pappas
Styling by
Dianna Lunt

Grooming by Dana Boyer at Art Department. Photographer’s assistant: Philipp Schmidt. Stylist’s assistant: Jonny Nickson. Shot at Slate Studios, New York.

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