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John C Reilly eyes me warily as I approach him at the deli in the San Fernando Valley where he’s suggested we meet for lunch. He’s standing near the door, dressed in a tan fedora with black suspenders holding up his slacks, looking like a man out of time. His shirt sleeves are rolled up in acknowledgement of the Southern Californian heat, and he appraises me with a cagey look that seems to ask: Is this the writer sent to interview me, or just some crazed fan wanting a selfie and to “shake and bake” with the guy from Talladega Nights?
A few moments later, after we slide into a booth and order matzo ball soup and pots of tea, Reilly confesses he’s become uneasy with his level of fame. When his career first took off in the mid-1990s, Reilly’s humanity and emotional authenticity made him one of America’s finest character actors, beloved by auteurs including Paul Thomas Anderson and Martin Scorsese. Then came a string of big-budget comedies: his aforementioned Will Ferrell Nascar romp in 2006 was followed in quick succession by sublime music spoof Walk Hard and Step Brothers, his reunion with Ferrell that cast the pair as rival step-siblings. It was those films that made Reilly a different kind of recognisable.
“That part of it I didn’t see coming, and I don’t especially like it,” he winces. “I’m much more shy and private than fame allows. I’m not one of those performers that has a hole deep inside that has to be filled by the audience’s anonymous affection.” That shyness marks our time together. On topics he’s keen to talk about, Reilly will happily hold court for 20 minutes uninterrupted. That verbosity, though, is a sort of defence mechanism, a means of keeping the conversation on safe ground; when we veer towards subjects he’s not interested in discussing, he has no qualms about letting a silence hang in the air.
Lately, Reilly has been wondering what it is that motivates him. In recent years, he’s enjoyed blockbuster success voicing the title character of Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph films, and critical acclaim leading an ensemble cast in the HBO basketball drama Winning Time. When the latter was cancelled in 2023, he allowed himself a moment to ponder what he wanted to do next. “I was trying to find meaning for my own life,” he says. “I’m 60 years old. I’ve done over 80 movies, a whole bunch of plays. I’ve made a lot of money and got pretty famous for a kid from the south side of Chicago. I asked myself: what gets you up in the morning now?”
The answer, it turned out, was show tunes. Back in 2002, Reilly starred in the film adaptation of the musical Chicago as Amos, the oft-overlooked husband of Renée Zellweger’s Roxie Hart. The role gifted him the big musical number “Mister Cellophane”, which he pulled off with such aplomb that he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. “I had an amazing experience playing that role, and got all this attention for it,” he remembers. “Then it was over, and I just went on with my career.”
Reilly daydreamed about taking “Mister Cellophane” on tour, but the plan was hamstrung by an obvious flaw: the character only has one song. Instead, he sought out music in a similar style, old standards from the Great American Songbook and newer compositions by Tom Waits that could showcase the raw emotion of his singing voice. “The first one was Irving Berlin’s ‘What’ll I Do’,” he says. “I spent 20 years collecting songs as good as that, but I realised they aren’t about not being seen, which is what ‘Mister Cellophane’ is about. They’re about being deeply in love, or regretting a love that you lost, or dreaming of a love to be. I realised this guy’s not Mister Cellophane. He’s Mister Romantic.”
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Reilly brings his Mister Romantic tour to London and Dublin later this month (Bobbi Rich)
So for the last couple of years, Reilly has been touring the United States as Mister Romantic, a vaudeville singer born anew each night on stage when he steps out from the steamer trunk where he lives. Reilly devised the character – who he is bringing to London and Dublin later this month – not just as a vehicle for the songs he wants to share, but also as a response to a world in need of a clown who wears his heart on his sleeve. “I was looking at what’s happening politically, what’s happening to our empathy and what’s happening to us as a result of phones,” he says. “This thing that was supposed to connect us is really dividing us. So out of joy and despair, I created this mythical character.”
When Mister Romantic emerges from his box, he exists under two rules: he has to put on a show, and he doesn’t have to go back in the box if he can successfully find someone who’ll love him forever. No two shows are ever the same, as the conceit allows Reilly to present an unpredictable mix of torch songs, old-fashioned showmanship and interactive crowd work. It also grants him distance from any audience preconceptions. He concedes that his previous musical venture, a straight-faced bluegrass band, had puzzled fans who turned up expecting to laugh at the bozo from Step Brothers.
“Mister Romantic has no memory,” he explains. “What that does for the audience is it puts everyone into the present moment. I’m not talking about current events. I’m just talking about things in this room tonight. For an actor who doesn’t like to really be himself in front of an audience, it’s a great way to do a show.”
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Samuel L Jackson with Reilly in Paul Thomas Anderson’s first feature film ‘Hard Eight’ (Rysher Entertainment)
While Reilly may have created the character in part to shield himself from the public gaze, the show is in fact the most personal work he’s ever done. Born in Chicago on 24 May 1965, Reilly grew up singing along to Irving Berlin and George Gershwin songs on his mother’s player piano. The fifth of six children in an Irish Catholic family, he discovered his love of performance early on, taking part in his church youth group’s “clown ministry”. “They taught us makeup and the rules and ethos of clowning,” he remembers. “Then we’d go to street fairs or nursing homes, and just do it for free.”
As he got older, his focus shifted to serious theatrical roles. Reilly made his first film appearance in 1988 as a thug in the Chicago-set Steven Seagal movie Above The Law before landing small parts in Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War and Tony Scott’s Days of Thunder, alongside Tom Cruise. Then, in 1994, an event at the Sundance Film Festival paired him with aspiring 24-year-old filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson.
“I’d done like a dozen movies by the time I met Paul, and he was one of the first people that put together, ‘Wait, that’s that same actor,’” he recalls. They became fast friends. “This is where we would meet, two booths that way,” he says, swivelling to point out the spot in the deli. “He’s just a brilliant writer, and really funny. He comes from a big family like me. We just really hit it off.”
In 1996, when Anderson made his debut feature, Hard Eight, he gave Reilly his first starring role as the wide-eyed gambler whom Phillip Baker Hall takes under his wing. They collaborated again on Boogie Nights and Magnolia, the films that began Anderson’s ongoing unlucky Oscars streak; he’s been nominated 11 times but never won. Asked if this year’s One Battle After Another could change things for his friend, Reilly replies: “I’d say it’s long overdue!”
When the world is so harsh, it can be a hard sell to ask people to just forget everything and laugh
Reilly seems less eager to dwell on the comedies he’s best known for. When I start to ask something about Step Brothers, he becomes quietly fascinated by the bowl in front of him. His co-star Ferrell and the film’s director Adam McKay ended their long working relationship in 2019, reportedly over McKay’s decision to cast Reilly instead of Ferrell in Winning Time, so the trio’s time together could be considered rocky terrain. Alternatively, Reilly’s hesitancy might simply be explained by the dissonance between the lovelorn ballads he’s currently touring and that film’s crass rap parody “Boats ’N Hoes”.
“I did write a lot of that song,” he notes briefly, quoting the lyrics: “‘The Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria/ I’ll do you in the bottom while you’re drinking sangria.’ For better or worse, that was written by me.” He trails off, and looks back at his soup. “It’s a rough one, though, when you’re in public with your kids and people are screaming ‘Boats ’N Hoes’ at you through the airport.”
Reilly has more to say about Walk Hard, which struggled at the box office in 2007 but has since built a dedicated following among those enamoured by its loving send-up of music biopic cliches and the surprisingly sharp songs crafted for its fictional protagonist, Dewey Cox. Reilly has provisional plans to revive Cox for a string of live shows to celebrate the film’s 20th anniversary in a couple of years.
“Right now, it’s just my idea,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to go back out on tour as Dewey Cox, because we did a tour when the movie came out, but no one knew the songs. Now that movie is a serious cult favourite, especially among musicians. Jack White expressed interest in re-releasing the soundtrack on vinyl. So I have a feeling we’re going to sell some tickets for that tour.”
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Will Ferrell and Reilly starred together in the anarchic 2008 comedy ‘Step Brothers’ (Sony Pictures)
The era of studio comedies that produced Talladega Nights, Walk Hard and Step Brothers seems to belong to the distant past. Some have blamed shifts in the cinema business, but Reilly suggests the prevailing cultural mood has just as much to do with it. “My theory is that comedy is like a flower garden,” he argues. “The conditions have to be right for something as innocent and beautiful as comedy to bloom. When the world is so harsh, it can be a hard sell to ask people to just forget everything and laugh about it all.”
That brings us back to Mister Romantic, Reilly’s earnest attempt to remind the world to love each other, one song at a time. He released an in-character album, What’s Not to Love?, earlier this year and says he hopes to keep performing the show for the rest of his life. Rising up blinking from that trunk each night, he’s found the meaning he was searching for.
“It’s a pretty empty life for an actor to just be chasing fame and money,” he says. “Once you get to the place I’m at, you want to leave behind a world that’s worth living in. Elon Musk and some of these other guys say empathy is a weakness, empathy is a trap. It’s not true. Empathy is a cornerstone of civilisation. So I decided to do something with my worries, rather than just let them sicken me. I decided to shine a light on the things I think are wonderful.”
We’re out of time. As Reilly stands to leave, we start to exchange a few words about living in Los Angeles, but I see him hesitate, defences back up. His finger hovers over my dictaphone.
“I’m going to press stop,” he says.
‘Mister Romantic’ is at Soho Theatre Walthamstow from 17 to 19 November and at Dublin’s Ambassador Theatre on 20 November. ‘What’s Not to Love?’ is available to stream now