The Timely Arrival and Urgent Ambition of Jonathan Majors

In Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods and HBO’s Lovecraft Country, Jonathan Majors emerged as one of Hollywood’s most charismatic new leading men—a brilliant Yale-trained Method actor with a timeless appeal. Now he’s channeling all his gifts into an urgent mission: bringing to life all the untold epics of Black America.
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The day after George Floyd died, as the news reached Jonathan Majors, he was far from home. But he knew who he wanted to connect with. And so he tapped out three long messages to Spike Lee. He'd been texting with the director before, when he learned of Ahmaud Arbery's death. Now, on a warm night in late May, as the country was about to erupt, his phone buzzed with a reply. “All he responded was, ‘We're built for this,’ ” Majors tells me. “He was mentoring me. And I feel we are. We are built for this.”

Just a couple of weeks later, Netflix released Da 5 Bloods, the project that had brought the actor and the director together, in which Majors stars as an estranged son joining his father and three other veterans on a trip back to Vietnam. While on set last year, Majors started to give serious thought to the kinds of moments that define generations. A Vietnam project can stir those sorts of ruminations, especially for somebody who grew up like Majors did. His father was in Desert Storm; his maternal grandfather in Korea and Vietnam, his paternal grandfather in World War II. But his own era was different. America's murky wars in the Middle East dragged on through his teenage years, but there was no clear cause that stamped his generation. Not until this past summer, when the collective energy and purpose he saw in the streets revealed a moment of great opportunity. “This is our war right now,” says Majors, who turned 31 in September. “And I feel very activated, and kind of enlisted.”

As one of the most exciting breakout actors in Hollywood, Majors is on a mission to deliver a new kind of epic—films that are etching the Black American experience into its rightful place in the canon. They're stories he feels the country is finally ready to confront. “We've hit a point where we're all kind of hungry,” he says. “We want the narrative to be told. We want it to be truthful. The age of authenticity is upon us now.”

This ambition has been at play in the roles that have begun to make him a star, ones that finally make Black men central characters in the American tapestry. As Mont, the sensitive playwright in The Last Black Man in San Francisco—2019's small-budget but hugely beloved indie hit that established his name—he stares down the forces of gang violence and gentrification. As David, the son of a Vietnam veteran, in Da 5 Bloods, he reckons with the unique trauma afflicting a generation of Black servicemen. As Atticus, the lead of the new HBO series Lovecraft Country, he grapples with the bigotry and terror of Jim Crow. And as Nat Love, the 19th-century gunslinger in The Harder They Fall, the project he's now at work on, he's rewriting the flawed myth of the American cowboy.

In each of these projects, Majors is also doing something more: creating indelible characters through a rare combination of deft poetry, kinetic energy, and a kind of ever present spirituality. “We ain't had one of these in a while,” says Jeymes Samuel, who's at work with Majors now as the director of The Harder They Fall. He acknowledges certain grand comparisons. “People say he's the new Denzel, as if there can only be one great Black actor,” he says. But Samuel prefers to emphasize the singularity of Majors's talent: “Everyone should see that Jonathan Majors is the new Jonathan Majors.”


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In February, back when the world was a different place, Majors arrived in Santa Fe to begin work on the film. It was a thrilling project: an all-Black Western, costarring Idris Elba, that Jay-Z was producing for Netflix with a reported budget of $90 million. He'd been cast as the lead: legendary slave turned cowboy Nat Love, a.k.a. Deadwood Dick, a gunslinger who, having learned that the man who killed his parents (Elba) has been released from prison, reunites with his old team of outlaws to exact his retribution. The film marks the feature-length directorial debut of Samuel, a singer-songwriter also known as The Bullitts (and as Seal's younger brother), who collaborated with Jay-Z on the score of The Great Gatsby. It was a rare assemblage of talent for a new kind of film, one that promised to reinvigorate the entire Western genre, but production was curtailed by the pandemic just before filming started. One by one, the cast and crew left Santa Fe and went home. They resolved to try again in the fall.

But Jonathan Majors stayed. When reached via Zoom, he's in the courtyard of the house he's renting, looking focused and calm in a faded denim jacket and a burgundy beanie. It's a cool Monday morning, and gospel music plays softly from his computer. Majors, many of whose friends call him Jai (pronounced “Jay”), has been in limbo for months now, but he seems at home, perhaps because, like a true hero of the Old West, he doesn't mind being a drifter. “Get set, do the job, and then, Lord willing, I'm going someplace else,” he says. “My daughter's in Atlanta, so I always get back there.”

For Samuel, Majors's decision to stay put reflects the intensity of his commitment. “As the lead, I think he wanted to hold it down for everyone else and keep the whole project on its feet,” he says. It was also, he feels, the result of Majors's fully immersive, jovially inclusive form of Method acting. “He makes the whole making of the movie a Western,” Samuel says. “He'll come around with his cigarillo, his cap. He turned the entire environment into the Old West. You are living, breathing, eating, and sleeping the movie because of Jonathan Majors. It's an unbelievable thing to witness.” Then he puts it another way: “The film is just a really beautiful portrayal of Black people in the Old West. And at the top of that mountain is Jonathan Majors.”

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If Majors is a wonderful presence on set, he is even more adept in front of the camera. “This dude is literally precision casting,” Samuel says. “I did not cast Jonathan Majors as Nat Love. He is Nat Love. It's like Nat Love cast himself as Jonathan Majors.” It helped, of course, that Majors could do many of his own stunts. “Jonathan is a dope horse rider,” Samuel says. “His family in Texas, they are straight cowboys. He's the one person out of the cast that didn't need a refresher.”

As the months passed, Samuel and Majors eventually found themselves the only two members of the cast and crew left on set, and they began to develop a friendship. Samuel had brought a guitar with him, and one night Majors picked it up and began playing some chords. “He started taking lessons and became so dope on it, it's actually in the movie,” says Samuel, who likens Majors's sound to “an old-school Robert Johnson with soulful Neil Young-esque vocals.”

By summer's end, Samuel came to realize that beyond being a uniquely talented, multifaceted artist, his leading man was also a deeply thoughtful guy. “Jonathan Majors, every night, would check up on me,” he says. “I'll be minding my own business and my stomach will growl. Next minute, I see his car pulling up, and he'll bring me fish, noodles, miso soup. Nightly. In the morning, he'll come by: ‘Here you are. Making sure you're all right. Just bringing you some breakfast, turmeric.’ Literally making sure that my head space is clear. It's a really deep thing. Everything for him is about family, camaraderie, and the lifestyle of the film.”

In mid-August, when Lovecraft Country premiered, Samuel organized an intimate Zoom viewing: He and Majors watched from Santa Fe, Jay-Z and Beyoncé from the Hamptons. And so, far from his family and friends, during a time of immense flux for the country, Jonathan Majors sat in rare company and watched his career officially and undeniably shift into another gear. Filming was scheduled to soon resume on The Harder They Fall, and he was eager to get back to work. “There's a COVID test, and it's not what you think,” Majors says. “It's not a matter of are you positive or negative for COVID, but how are you going to make it through this moment?”


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On Lovecraft Country, Majors plays a young Army vet who, at the height of Jim Crow, drives from Chicago to New England in search of his missing father, along the way traversing a world of terrors both supernatural and very real. Produced by Misha Green, J.J. Abrams, and Jordan Peele, it's a show in which the racism is often as horrific as the sci-fi monsters, and for Majors, one specific scene brought back chilling memories. Imagine: It's a summer day, and you're driving through the country with the girl you've got a crush on. You pull over and step out of the car, because you're a little lost, and so you don't see the cruiser until it's too late. Walking back to the vehicle, you look at your crush. Her face tightens. It's not a new predicament—a law-abiding Black driver, a white cop.

That moment felt so real to Majors in part because he lived a version of it growing up in Dallas. “It's almost as if Texas was happening in Lovecraft Country,” he says. “You get pulled over by the cops. They harass you. They call you a n-gger. They make you call yourself a n-gger, in front of the girl you've got a crush on. It would be like the worst day in Texas. I've experienced that day.”

On his end of the Zoom, the birds chirp and the wind rustles the trees of the courtyard. “The fun part about the show is: Now the monsters come,” he says. “That was different.”

When Majors reflects on his Texas adolescence, he recalls unsettling episodes of a different nature. His father left the family when Majors was nine, and for a stretch his mother raised Jonathan, his elder sister, Monica, and his younger brother, Cameron, by herself. (Majors and his father have since reconnected and are rebuilding their relationship.) “I grew up very poor,” Majors says. His mother sometimes donated blood just so he could have lunch money.

He grew up in Cedar Hill, a Dallas suburb where social fault lines were exposed early. With particular clarity he recalls the day in sixth grade when his teacher told the class about a choice they all had to make: Each student was asked to list their preferences for the courses they would take the following year. It was a momentous decision, one that would separate them into three tracks that would set the trajectories for their lives—the advanced-placement kids, the pre-advanced-placement kids, and the kids who were, as Majors puts it, “expected to take woodshop for their electives.”

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Surrounded by classmates with privilege stitched into the logos of their shirts, Majors was acutely aware, in that instant, of his own clothes, which hung awkwardly on his skinny 12-year-old frame. “My shit was raggedy, man,” he recalls. “Payless and hand-me-downs.” He felt out of place in terms of after-school activities too. Some kids who aspired to be actors were already enrolled in theater classes at the Young Actors Studio, in northwest Dallas. “Which isn't even connected to the school,” he says. “It's a proper acting studio. I'm like, ‘Oh, wow. Fuck.’ ”

As he recalls, the teacher and school administrators made their way up and down the rows of students, ushering them through their choices. Majors could see them coming, could hear the other kids. Even at that young age, he knew where his privileged classmates were headed. It was where he wanted to go too. “I just knew if I wasn't in these pre-A.P. classes or A.P. classes, I was fucked,” he says.

The teacher continued toward him, correcting other students: “Oh, no, you want to be in this class.” Or: “You can be in this class.” The can in her voice hit hard. Most of his classmates had probably never heard can't in a real way. Not about their future. But he knew no one thought Jonathan Majors should enroll in pre-A.P. classes. “They don't think I'm shit,” he says. “And even the way the teacher handed me the paper was kind of like…” It was as if she'd already seen his life play out in her mind and decided a good ending would mean a job with “Jonathan Majors” on a name tag, not a billboard.

As the teacher reached his row, Majors says, he thought, “ ‘Okay. What am I doing here?’ And I'm like, ‘Oh, I'm the poor dumb kid. I'm in these shitty shoes.’ ” But that only lasted a beat. “On the spot, I say, ‘Fuck it.’ And I go, ‘Pre-A.P. Pre-A.P.’ I circle all pre-A.P. classes, and write my name, and turn that motherfucker in.”


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That self-belief came, in part, from the church, a deeply baked spirituality that infuses his life still. Though Majors has gone on to read the Koran and the Torah and to appreciate Hindu and Buddhist teachings, Christianity remains what he calls “my template, my first lexicon.” It was his mother, a pastor, who instilled those lessons. At home, she ran what he terms a “Christian military household,” one that drilled into him an unwavering conviction that he could control his fortunes: “If you work hard, you will win. If you are the best, you will win. If you are undeniable, you will win.”

Majors channeled that intensity into sports, taking up basketball and boxing and football. As with most everywhere in Texas, football was an especially big deal at Cedar Hill High School. “It's a joke down home,” Majors explains. “You say, ‘Well, what'd you have for breakfast?’ ‘Football.’ ‘What'd you do at school?’ ‘Football.’ ”

Majors took a different path. A brawl sophomore year got him pulled out of school and placed into an alternative-education school, which is where he developed an interest in reading—first Agatha Christie, then Shakespeare, Ibsen, and August Wilson. When he went back to his old school the following year, he dedicated himself to acting. Working as a barista at the Starbucks inside the local Barnes & Noble, he began to furtively read acting books, most of which he returned. “My first copy of Stanislavsky?” he says with a smile. “I didn't return that one.”

That year Majors began to compete in the dramatic-interpretation category of debate contests, performing monologues. His delivery of one from Before It Hits Home, Cheryl L. West's play about a Midwestern jazz musician grappling with AIDS, won him a second-place prize, but the recognition only left him hungrier for perfection. When he got home that night, he continued reciting the monologue over and over in an upstairs room between his bedroom and the one that belonged to his brother, Cameron, a 13-year-old with bifocals and a love of football who didn't quite understand his brother's affinity for acting.

“It's about one o'clock, two o'clock in the morning,” Majors recalls, “and my brother walked out and said, ‘Jai?’ And I was still in the piece. And I turned around, and I was crying because I was crying in the piece, and my brother was crying.”

“And I looked at him and I said, ‘Cameron.’

“He said, ‘Jai.’

“I said, ‘What?’

“He said, ‘You okay?’

“I said, ‘Yeah, I'm all right.’

“He said, ‘Man, that was so good.’

“And I thought, ‘If Cam is fucking with this, it's bigger than me. It's for us. Whatever this thing that's been put in me, it's not just my talent.’ And that's when I knew: This is it. This is going to do it.”

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From then on, Majors didn't stop acting. He enrolled in the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, in Winston-Salem, the first public arts conservatory in the country. Over summer breaks he would study at other drama schools to keep honing his skills. “Like an athlete, right?” Majors explains. “You train in the off-season.”

After his freshman year, he took a class at the prestigious William Esper Studio, in Manhattan, an academy whose alumni include Jeff Goldblum, Amy Schumer, and Ramy Youssef. There he was introduced to an art form that would fully engage his inner thespian: Balinese masked dancing. The objective, he learned, was to attain a quality the Balinese call taksu, a kind of artistic charisma of the soul. According to Hindu teachings, taksu was the essence left by the gods when they departed the island of Bali. “It's very akin to the Holy Spirit,” Majors says. To attain it, he explains, you must have total mastery of your art form, your tools, and the space in which you're working. “The best way to explain it is Michael Jordan,” he says. “Or Diana Ross.” Then he puts it a different way: “If someone says they're in ‘beast mode,’ that's usually what they're saying.”

Flash forward five years: It's the summer of 2015, after Majors's second year at the Yale School of Drama, and he's at the famed acting conservatory at the Chautauqua Institution, in western New York, not far from Lake Erie. He's playing the titular role in Henry V. Things are going well. Then, one night, he meets an instructor, Budi Miller, who, it turns out, runs an acting/mask-dancing center in Bali. They spend the evening driving a golf cart around the 19th-century grounds, talking about their craft and ultimately lamenting the absence of a certain quality in their work: spirituality.

Back at Yale, Majors hatches a plan—a group trip to Bali to study with Miller. His traveling companions, he decides, will be his fellow members of the school's pan-African theater company, Folks, founded in 1981 by Angela Bassett and reinvigorated by Lupita Nyong'o's class around the time Majors got to the program. Majors arranges for a mentor and benefactor to fund much of the excursion, and the group flies to the island in the Indian Ocean for a 10-day trip over New Year's.

From the moment they land, it's a dream. They stay at the compound of a renowned dancer and scholar, an idyllic, secluded property with an outdoor living room opening onto seemingly endless rice paddies. As a kind of orientation, they climb an active volcano, Mount Agung, starting just before midnight on Christmas Eve. They hike on rocky ledges through the dark, occasionally passing Hindu temples where they stop and pray. As Majors's schoolmate Lauren Banks recalls, “Jai was motivating everybody, kind of like a coach. Just like if you were running cross-country and it's like, ‘Everybody, we got this.’ ” They reach the peak at dawn on Christmas morning, everyone huddling together at the summit drinking coffee as they watch the sun rise.

“That's where we got really tight,” Majors recalls. “We were on the other side of the world.” Back at the compound, there was more bonding: Banks found a lizard skittering over her wall, terrifying her and prompting Majors to dub her Gecko. But the true chemistry happened when they danced. Majors's friend and classmate Julian Elijah Martinez remembers the routine: “We would go through a warm-up that would last about three hours, get crazy sweaty and tired.” When they put on the masks—beautiful, ornate wooden carvings—they find themselves freed up to improvise in ways they've never known. “Then we would be where our spirit would lead us,” Martinez says. At the culmination of the trip, they stage a Balinese masked dance, a performance about Black Westerners they call Insurrection, and afterward, Majors begins to grasp something he'd never found in an American acting class. “They don't teach spirituality,” he says. “I understand why, because you can't teach it. It's something that happens over time. But I think it's integral to telling stories that aren't just commentary. Stories that come from the well of humanity.”


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At the bottom of the online résumé Jonathan Majors compiled for the spring showcase his final year at Yale, in the “special skills” section, next to basketball and football and tumbling and boxing, there's an apt phrase: “highly physical.” Banks remembers how she'd always see him out for an early-morning run before class. Martinez recalls first meeting him at the gym, this “Spartan” whose crazy workouts he couldn't help eyeing—workouts that soon became the basis for their friendship. “I'd be going through some shit,” Martinez recalls, “and Jai would see me in class, and he'd be like, ‘Yo, man, let's go to the gym,’ and we'd go to the gym and I'd just sit there and bare my soul to this brother.”

Eventually they decided to embark on a project, one so grand it would permanently bond them. They decided to produce the collected plays of August Wilson, the Pulitzer-winning playwright who famously captured the social history of Black Pittsburgh in his Century Cycle. Bringing those plays to Yale, Martinez says, was part of a bigger ambition: to expand the canon of plays they studied and performed at the school. It was an urgent task, and they immersed themselves in Wilson's plays, a process that became all-consuming. “Over the course of a year,” Martinez says, “we put together these readings that became more and more elaborate, until the very end, when we had music cues and lighting shifts and all kinds of crazy shit with no budget and volunteering our time. We lost sleep, skipped meals, just living on the love of it.”

As they staged performance after performance, the quality Martinez noticed most in Majors was a certain openness, a knowing vulnerability. “I hadn't experienced a Black man engage in that way,” he says. “It's always like we have to have a certain kind of armor, right? And if you ever show a chink in that armor, if there's ever rust on that armor, then you're dead. Jai is the first person I've met who's like, ‘No. My openness and my vulnerability, that is actually my strength.’ ”

Banks, who now stars alongside Kevin Bacon and Aldis Hodge in the Boston police procedural City on a Hill, echoes that assessment. “He plays soldiers, and he is a soldier,” she says. “He's had the experience of battle, both in his training and in life, that gives him that kind of strength. But at the same time, Jai takes good care of his inner child. And that softness allows a beautiful duality to his work.”

That range set him apart from his peers, and before Majors even graduated, he was cast on When We Rise, ABC's four-part 2017 series about the founding of the LGBTQ+ movement in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall riots. His role—as Ken Jones, a gay noncommissioned naval officer who encounters both racism and homophobia when he returns home from Vietnam—brought with it some personal challenges. “My mom's a pastor,” Majors explains, “and my first professional job, I was playing ‘the homosexual.’ And my mother called me and said she was getting a lot of pushback from her congregation because she was promoting the show. And she was like, ‘Yeah, but you understand Jai is not gay. He's just playing a character that's gay.’ And I was like, ‘Ma, you know you don't got to talk with people like that?’ I'm like, ‘Fuck them.’ ”

Majors would encounter bigotry in Hollywood too. He'd hoped the world of film and TV would be a meritocracy with a little luck stirred in, like football or what he'd heard of the military. “But that was not the case when I arrived,” he says. “Look, straight up, it wasn't the case in drama school.” The experience sobered him. “The American dream, that's for children. They have hopes. Let's be adults. Dreams are for children and old white men.”

He felt the industry was governed by “a certain amount of decorum” that he “was not privy to,” but nonetheless he made his way, starring alongside Christian Bale in the 2017 Western Hostiles, and alongside Matthew McConaughey in 2018's White Boy Rick, in which he played a drug kingpin in 1980s Detroit. After two years of solid work, he broke out in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a dreamlike, elegiac film about two friends struggling to cope in an ever evolving city.

At Sundance the picture won awards for best director and best creative collaboration, which in turn helped win the attention of Spike Lee—a transformative moment in Majors's career. “For me, the best thing a director can do is have a very clear vision and provide me with a very clear world,” he explains. “I need to know where our boundaries are, in order to play, in order to be free. And Spike gave us a very clear world. And trust. When you feel that your director trusts you, you're free within the canvas.”

To better understand the canvas of Da 5 Bloods, Majors looked to his mother's father, the Vietnam veteran. During childhood trips to visit Big Andy, as he was known, Majors remembers his grandmother repeating one admonition over and over: “Whatever you do, don't wake up Grandpa.” Only when he got the part in Da 5 Bloods did Majors begin to research why he should never wake Grandpa, and his uncle finally told him the story of a fatal encounter in Vietnam: One night, a Vietcong soldier sneaked into his grandfather's bunk and tried to kill him in his sleep. In a flash Big Andy jumped up and grabbed the man by his throat. “It took the medics putting a tranquilizer in his hand to have him open it up,” Majors says. “That's how much fear this man had. And the fear of that night stayed with him into his 80s, up until he passed.”

As Majors recounts this, he pauses. “So when you come to work,” he continues, “it's like this is a lot bigger than, with all due respect, a Spike Lee film. You know what I'm saying? This is about an entire canon that has not been expressed in cinema. And I'm responsible for that because it's in my DNA.”


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When Da 5 Bloods was released on Netflix, on June 12, protests were erupting in the streets in the aftermath of George Floyd's killing, and the film felt hyper-responsive to the moment. In fact, it had been hyper-responsive to other moments—the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Michael Brown, and so many others. The film tells the story of five Black men—four who served as platoon-mates in Vietnam, plus Jonathan Majors as David, the semiestranged son of Paul, played by Delroy Lindo—who return to Ho Chi Minh City some 45 years after the fall of Saigon, seeking to locate and bring home the remains of their fallen squad leader and to reclaim the gold bars he allegedly buried in the jungle. At the end of the movie, $2 million of that recovered gold is donated to the Black Lives Matter movement, a crowd of organizers chanting in the background.

The activist leader holding the check was in fact played by Hawk Newsome, then president of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, and his sheer presence stirred something deep in Majors. “That was a reminder of everything that was happening in the world back home, that was in the zeitgeist,” he says. In particular, it made him aware of his place in American society, how that was something he could never escape, even in Southeast Asia: “I've been removed from the machine, you see. I'm out of the United States of America. But within us, we carry that system. You are free, outwardly. But the mind is still held.”

The themes of Black subjugation and liberation run throughout the film. “I was consistently reminded of the burdens of what it is to be an American, a Black American,” he explains. He found himself thinking, at times, of cultural icons who had left the country—Ella Fitzgerald, James Baldwin—and why they stayed abroad so long. “Because it takes a while to loosen those locks on the brain.”

It's hard to imagine Jonathan Majors letting go and living the expat life—he seems too duty bound, too dedicated to the cause of telling authentic American stories. As Delroy Lindo puts it, “He's rooted not only as a human being but in his culture, in his own history.”

Majors, for his part, has plenty of ideas about how Hollywood can showcase that history, and at one point he begins to muse on the many Black projects he'd like to see greenlighted. It's clear at this moment what he meant by feeling “enlisted.” Jonathan Majors, an actor with a military lineage and a knack for playing veterans, is, at his core, a soldier in the fight for a richer canon. The more we talk about this mission, the more animated he becomes, until he starts riffling through ideas like an agent pitching scripts:

Marriage Story. Noah Baumbach, with our DNA, what does that look like?”

“An all-Black adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull.

“What does illness look like in the Black body? Tell me a story about a cancer patient with a Black lead, because then we get back into the systematic fuckery that happens if you are a Black person with a real illness.”

“What would it look like if we had a Black person dealing with the opioid crisis? Not crack cocaine but the same thing that Bobby and Jane are doing. Can we tell that story? Where's our Beautiful Boy?”

A fear often shared by Black artists is that Hollywood will make room for only one narrative on each subject, as opposed to the dozens told through the white gaze. Running through the marquee names, Majors explains how constraining that can be. “Horror, Brother Peele has got that on lock,” he says. “It's Coogler. It's Spike. It's Denzel Washington. That idea of only one, we've got to bust it. We've got to break that head-slave mentality.”

Jonathan Majors is, of course, fast becoming one of those names. Taking a sip of coffee, he leans back and pauses to reflect. “Someone once said to me, ‘I wish for you an ordinary life and an extraordinary career,’ ” he says. “And so I try to keep it that way, hella grounded, talk to my family, spend time by myself a lot. I find that to be the best kind of balm when shit gets crazy.”

An ordinary life is proving a little elusive this summer. As for an extraordinary career, it seems to be happening. Spike Lee has said, with characteristic brevity, that Majors has all the goods. And as Jonathan Majors's extraordinary year unfolds, he remains focused on the bigger narrative: how other Black actors might get past the old Hollywood gatekeepers. “We got the ball now,” he says. “I don't give a fuck how you get in the door. Rob, steal, kill, hook, crook, whatever you got to do. And you're in there, you're in now. Go to work. Make it undeniable. It's our job as artists to stay bold. To continue the protest, continue the year of authenticity.”

J.M. Holmes is the author of the short-story collection ‘How Are You Going to Save Yourself.’ This is his first article for GQ.

A version of this story originally appears in the October 2020 issue with the title "The Moment Belongs to Jonathan Majors."


PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Shaniqwa Jarvis
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Grooming by Sincere Gilles for Director’s Cut, Inc.
Tailoring by Ksenia Golub