Jonathan Majors

Episode notes

Jonathan Majors attends the European Premiere of Creed III at Cineworld Leicester Square on February 15, 2023 in London, England. (Photo by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for Warner Bros.)

Jonathan Majors has been acting professionally for about seven years now. He’s done theater, television, and starred in movies. In that short amount of time, he’s become one of the most captivating performers in Hollywood.

On screen, Jonathan is charismatic and charming when the role calls for it, and he can turn to vulnerable and broken almost instantly. He’s the kind of actor that just takes the story to the next level. 

He starred in two of our recent favorites: Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods and Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man In San Francisco. 

When we talked with Jonathan Majors in 2021, he was up for an Emmy for his work on HBO’s Lovecraft Country.

The show is based on a book by Matt Ruff. The book and the TV series pull from some of H.P. Lovecraft’s most iconic tropes – dark mansions with hidden secrets, huge monsters covered with eyeballs.

But, it also reckons with Lovecraft’s work. H.P. Lovecraft is often seen as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, but he also wrote essays, stories and poems that were unapologetically racist.

Lovecraft Country confronts his legacy head on.

Jonathan Majors portrays Atticus in the show. A young black man traveling across the US in the 1950’s to find his missing father. Atticus embarks on the supernatural journey alongside his friend Letitia and his uncle George.

There are plenty of moments where Atticus and the rest of the protagonists fight to escape literal monsters. But, the characters also face very real threats from other people: racist police, burning crosses, lynchings.

Since his time on Lovecraft Country, Jonathan has gone on to appear in some of the biggest films over the past 2 years.  

These days you can see him in Creed III and Devotion. And, he’s also in a huge Marvel film. He plays the role of Kang the Conqueror in Antman and the Wasp: Quantumania. 

This interview originally aired in August of 2021