COVER STORY | Could You Love John C. Reilly Forever?

Earlier in our conversation, I had asked Reilly why he came up with Mister Romantic. He didn’t have an explicit answer then, but he voluntarily returned to the question 10 minutes later. “I wanted to see, ‘Does the world want this?’” he remembers. “And I can tell you now, having done the show many, many, many times over years, that they really want it. In fact, every day that goes by, they want it more.” When Reilly created his Mister Romantic alter-ego, stripped him of a memory, and threw him into the present moment, the same result happened with the audience. “They’re not analyzing, ‘Does John really think that?’ They’re just like, ‘This guy doesn’t know what day of the week it is, he doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know these other people in the band.’ I think that creates something special in our world, which is this moment that we all have together. Not to be corny or sentimental, but what’s happening in this room is the most important thing in these 90 minutes. We’ve done this show on days when there have been terrible shootings or awful developments in war, and you can see people come in and wear that heaviness. They’re carrying that information with them, and then, when they realize what’s happening [at the show], it’s about us all connecting. You can see all the shoulders relax.”

WHEN THE SHOW BEGINS, the crowd cheers upon Reilly’s entrance. He asks us, “Could you love me forever?” Everyone passionately yells “Yes!” back at him, because they know who he is and know his filmography well. But, across 90 minutes, they all let go of John C. Reilly and embrace Mister Romantic. It’s a gratifying ending to an otherwise break-even financial proposition for Reilly. “The audience just wants to play along, once they understand what’s going on, or what the character believes, or the place he’s at,” he says. “That’s alive. It’s not just some rehearsed thing, or some song that we’ve done a million times and now we’re going to try to keep it fresh. It’s alive, and I’m only interested in that. At this point in my life, it’s just a gift to give back to people—to say, ‘This is worth doing. It’s worth trying to love someone.’ I wish that wasn’t such a radical thing to say, but it is.”

At the Franklin Theatre in Nashville last month, Reilly singled out two local men who were, in his own words, “not in my personal political spectrum.” Finding a connection with them became a challenge to him. “I was like, ‘I just want to connect with you as a human being. I’m not trying to kiss you, or get in your pants, or make you compromise what you believe. I want you to see me, and I want to see you.’” Music has a way of routing itself straight into your heart, Reilly argues. It doesn’t require analysis; you don’t have to overwork your brain to “get it.” “It hits you or it doesn’t hit you,” he says. “And, if it hits you right, it feels pretty universal.”

When it came time for Reilly to rub noses with the men, one obliged him. He’s done crowd work before, but after a few dozen Mister Romantic shows, Reilly has become attuned to the shyness of others: “It’s cruel to talk to them at that moment. You avoid those people. You’re looking for someone who’s really in the present moment with you.” His rule of thumb is, if he can tell that his affectionate gestures aren’t cute to an audience member, or if that kind of teasing might be a red flag for them, he just won’t do it. “I’m trying to find common ground. And hopefully people, regardless of their political stripes or their gender or their sexuality or their musical tastes, walk out and feel like something just happened in there—like, I just experienced something real that wasn’t a show-business performance, that wasn’t some songs from an album. We had an experience together. It feels like that almost every time.”

Reilly puts himself out on the line every time he performs Mister Romantic. It’s a vulnerable, intimate show that consumes much of his energy. But there’s a reward to culling a 90-minute pageant of warmth and laughter from the inexplicableness of entropy. Very few performers are marrying music, comedy, and “emotional investigations” like this, especially not household names like Reilly. Maybe clowns, he contends. But when Reilly gets back in his trunk and is wheeled out of sight at night’s end, he knows that every tool and talent he possesses was used. “At this point in my life, as I’m getting older, that’s all I want. I just want to feel like I’m of use to the world, that I’m giving everything I can give. And I think, if everyone did that, regardless of the lane that we’re supposed to be in, the world would be a better place.”

MISTER ROMANTIC IS A PARADOX, flourishing in musical modernity while its out-of-time sentimentality soothes the listener. The songs, like “La Vie En Rose,” “Dream,” and “Picture In a Frame,” are especially nostalgic if they were a part of your life before watching the show or listening to its accompanying album, What’s Not to Love? Reilly juxtaposes their importance: “The songs are all bangers, every single one of them are eternal melodies.” Most of the time though, he furthers, they’re like seashells on the beach. “They already belong to everyone, and they’re already all there,” he adds. “All I’m doing is picking up a shell and being like, ‘Look at this one! Isn’t that beautiful?’ I think it’s part of the mission of my life, to keep sharing music—because I think music just gets lost. You have to sing songs and you have to hear them performed live for a song to really stay alive.”

Reilly tells me that he knows this music because Harry Nilsson loved it, just as Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole had before him. The survival of the Great American Songbook is one of his cardinal fascinations. “What is it about ‘Amazing Grace’?” he asks. “There were thousands of songs going on at the time ‘Amazing Grace’ was written, but that one got remembered, for some reason—either the words and the storytelling of a song, or just the literal chemistry of this note after that note.” That’s a magical thing that human beings can do: put notes together like a math equation and then let it touch people. “One of the only things that we can do is create harmony. You sing that note and I’ll sing this note. And when we do that, there’s a third thing that happens that was not there before, and it would not be there if not for our cooperation,” Reilly continues. “The vibrations of music—of singing—really heal your body. They heal your brain and your soul.”

A lot of folks, especially millennials, may associate Reilly’s musicality with his Oscar-nominated performance in Chicago, or his drummer aspirations in Step Brothers, or his turn as Dewey Cox in Walk Hard. Or maybe you saw him sing with Sierra Ferrell at Newport Folk Festival. But his passion for musical revue goes back 50 years—back to him and his mother singing together in their Chicago Lawn neighborhood home. Instead of going to cabarets or jazz clubs on the South Side of town, he learned “What’ll I Do” from a paper roll on a player piano. At 18, Reilly discovered Tom Waits’ music for the first time. He’d meet the Los Angeles crooner eventually, backstage at the Steppenwolf after a Grapes of Wrath performance in the late ‘90s. Reilly set Waits up with his first acting teacher; over 20 years later, he met up with Waits and his old friend Sean Penn on the set of Licorice Pizza. Cosmically, Waits released “Picture In a Frame” in 1999, just as Reilly’s film career was hurtling toward an apex, in the payoff of Boogie Nights and The Thin Red Line.

But stepping into the revelatory world of The Heart of Saturday Night and Blue Valentine, right as he was headed to DePaul University to study stage-acting, changed Reilly’s life, thanks to the truth Tom Waits sang about and the characters he created. “It matters what your esthetic is. It’s not just a style choice. It says something deep about your humanness, to care about the quality of what you do enough to work at it and to have the courage to share it with people.” To Reilly, the things that matter are the things that move him, us. Quality matters, even when it’s hard to maintain. In that sense, he yearns for the era of The Dick Cavett Show and the late-night host’s interview style—how he’d talk to Orson Welles or Flip Wilson in a conversational, living room-style manner and let his guests say whatever they believed.

“Damn the torpedoes, who cares if people don’t agree with me? Marlon Brando is going to tell you what he thinks,” Reilly elaborates. “And that’s just disappeared, because it’s not convenient for capitalism. There’s no way to monetize it. You might offend someone and, therefore, you might lose money, because you lose part of your audience. It’s a real poverty of thought in the world.” He argues that marketplace considerations—news organizations, social media, streaming services—have made saying “It matters to love one another” a rebellious, unmarketable act. That’s why he started Mister Romantic. “I’m not doing it for the money, I’m doing it because I was challenged by the work, or because there’s something about it that’s interesting or funny. We have to get back to that. If I had a prescription for the world, I would say we need to get back to standing up for what human beings feel is important—and human beings are not Amazon. Human beings are not Coca-Cola, or Netflix.”

But my interview with John C. Reilly is not going to change the world. He and I both know this, and Reilly argues that, if we want our home to be a better place, or to at least resemble what it is we hope it could be, we have to start leading by example. He pauses for a moment. “When you’re at a red light and someone starts walking across the crosswalk, you have enough time to pull your car and make that right-hand turn,” he says. “[You think], ‘That person walking in the street would feel endangered by that. I should wait, because that person matters.’ That’s what changes the world: actual action, seeing people and doing it tiny bit by tiny bit. We all fail, and we all make the choice to just zip past the person anyway. But, if we can try to keep ourselves in touch with each other, I think that’s the key.”

All of the relationships in our lives are grounded in music somehow, Reilly insists. He returns to the thought of Harry Nilsson and raves about his 1973 album of standards, A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night, revealing that Mister Romantic wouldn’t exist without it. “I don’t know how much money [Nilsson] made on that record, but, to me, it’s one of the most important recordings of my life, because it kept these songs alive,” he says. “I don’t need to get any more famous or make any more money. I just want my life to have meaning. And I think that’s true of everybody, whether you’re a janitor or a rocket scientist or a journalist or a musician—you just want to feel like, at the end of the day, my life had meaning. What I did affected people and, possibly, made the world better than it was before I was here.” Reilly pauses, looks at the time, and grins. “Why not?”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.