John Krasinski names his five favourite movies: “Changed everything for me”
John Krasinski has a fascinating career. Ask different people, and they’ll tell you totally different projects they know him from. To a strong majority, he will always and forever be Jim Halpert, the lovable salesman from The Office. To fans with darker tastes, he’s Lee Abbott in the tense A Quiet Place franchise. Action movie lovers would know him as Jack Ryan. With an eclectic resume, it seems he has varied tastes to match.
Krasinski was 25 when he well and truly broke through into the industry. Before then, he’d got himself a theatre degree and had a stint writing scripts for Conan O’Brien, but without much more than a few commercials and a waiter job, his pathway looked bleak. Then, The Office came along. When he was cast as Jim Halpert, Krasinski really made an art form out of being the classic nice-guy, everyman role, becoming one of TV’s most beloved characters.
While it might sound like an insult, the actor would hold his hands up to being an actual everyman with his film tastes, revealing a late start in his cinema interest. “I was one of those kids who had never seen an indie film before I got to college. If it wasn’t a big, huge tentpole movie, or if it wasn’t on the radio, I hadn’t experienced it,” he said, remembering his commonly suburban upbringing. “Then, in college, I started getting into independent movies, which led me to classic movies, which led me to all this different stuff,” he admitted.
One of those revelations that he now considers one of his favourite movies was Kramer Vs Kramer, the 1979 Meryl Streep drama. He said the film has “some of the greatest writing I’ve ever seen, some of the gutsiest performances.” It helped open his eyes to a world beyond blockbusters as he said, “There’s just this unfiltered, raw energy, and despite how beautiful that movie is — and obviously, it’s a well-done movie — the fact [is] that they’re not making movies like that anymore.”
The rest of his favourite selections feel like a tour of the best moments in cinematic history as he went on a mission to discover all the nuggets of greatness that he missed out on. One of his biggest finds was the glory of Marlon Brando, as he picked two of his films. The first is the 1954 On The Waterfront. “That movie for me was my Marlon Brando experience before The Godfather, before Streetcar,” he said. Still, to this day, he considers that performance as one of the greatest in cinema: “There’s still nobody doing what he does in that movie. And so that really changed everything for me.”
His thoughts towards The Godfather are similar, sharing his amazement that the film has remained a broadly agreed upon favourite of cinephiles everywhere. “I feel like that movie has stood up to time [and] criticism, and yet everybody can find the exact same reasons as to why it’s awesome,” he said, “I mean, it’s so well-written. It’s a slow movie that you’re still riveted by.”
Rivalling Brando, he also praises another actor. “Timothy Hutton turns in one of the best male performances I’ve ever seen,” he said of Ordinary People. It’s impossible for him to try and pin down any one reason for his love for this 1980 movie as he admires “Everything from the way it was shot to the way it was acted.”
His final pick also comes down to the male lead. “I think it’s probably one of the most inspirational movies for me because of Paul Newman‘s performance,” he said as he picked The Verdict. But unlike the richly emotional performances in his other selections, it’s the reservation in this movie that makes it stand out, teaching him a lot for the varied roles he has taken on. “I think that is, to me, some of the best, [most] controlled acting in a movie,” he said. “I think that he has this incredible likability. Even though he’s a drunk, washed-up lawyer, you’re still rooting for him from the very beginning.”
Despite being a late entry into the world of classics, Krasinski’s quick catch-up has been broad. From political and family dramas to gangster flicks featuring some of the best actors in history, his eclectic tastes feel like a master class in how to be a great male lead.
John Krasinski’s favourite movies:
- Kramer Vs Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979)
- On The Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)
- The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
- Ordinary People (Robert Redford, 1980)
- The Verdict (Sidney Lumet, 1982)