‘Away We Go’ star Krasinski proves nice guys finish first
It’s over.
With the release of his new movie, “Away We Go,” John Krasinski can now be named the all-time champion: He is Perfect Relationship Guy.
As Jim Halpert, the funny, devoted beau of Pam on TV’s “The Office,” Krasinski had already made himself the reigning titleholder.
But with Burt Farlander, the actor has topped even himself. As the scruffy, futures-trading father-to-be in “Away We Go,” Krasinski hits relationship guy apex: a charmingly clumsy man who proposes to his girlfriend every other day and will stop at nothing to make her laugh.
Once again Krasinski, smiling bashfully, is victorious. He owns the heart of the girl on-screen and her sighing sisters in the audience.
“It’s just going to ruin my personal life forever,” he says with a sigh.
It is an awful lot to live up to, this fictional status, but Krasinski doesn’t do much to distance himself from the great-guy archetype. On the phone from Beverly Hills during one of a couple of dozen press interviews, the 29-year-old, who grew up outside Boston, is self-deprecating, witty and animated.
He is even willing to throw a few nuggets to fans who want to believe that something of Jim Halpert is true in John Krasinski.
“I’m a pretty sentimental guy. And I think that for me, romance is this thing that I take very seriously,” says Krasinski.
After reading the screenplay for “Away We Go,” written by prodigious writer Dave Eggers and his wife, Vendela Vida, Krasinski remembers telling his agent that it was one of the most resonant scripts he’d ever encountered — especially in its depiction of the relationship between Burt and his longtime girlfriend, Verona (Maya Rudolph), who journey across North America to decide where to make a life for themselves.
“This is the first romance that was written on the page that was so incredibly well done that it was a couple that you believed in,” the actor says. “To me it’s one of the more romantic couples because it’s not about the flowers and the diamonds. It’s about the secret languages and the looks to one another where everything is said without any words. ... It’s not only a relationship you admire from a fictional standpoint, but you desperately want to be in that relationship.”
Eggers has said he had Krasinski in mind for Burt even as he and Vida were writing the film. “That’s what they say,” Krasinski deadpans. “I want to make sure Dave knows I’m not Ryan Gosling.”
Krasinski says he’d been a fan of Eggers for years, so when director Sam Mendes called to offer him the part, well, “I passed out and had a nosebleed, but then I woke up and figured, ‘This is an amazing opportunity.’ ”
Krasinski says the relationship Eggers and Vida crafted in the script was an ideal that exists in a universe that felt both real and familiar.
“It’s the most honest movie. In your 20s, early 30s, even into your 40s, you have these huge existential moments about, like, ‘Who am I?’ ‘What am I doing?’ ‘Am I good enough?’ ” he explains. “I feel like this is the world that my friends and I are living in right now.”
Though, in truth, the world Krasinski lives in right now is a little more charmed than that of either Jim Halpert or Burt Farlander. He recently finished his 100th episode of “The Office,” and he made his directing debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January with a feature- length adaptation of the book “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.”
“Life is going really well,” he says. “I feel very lucky. I know it’s a rare thing to be working on something so hard and to be proud of it — that’s a rare combination, unfortunately.”
It might surprise some Jim groupies that the project Krasinski picked for his first time behind the camera actually chronicles some of the worst-ever relationship guys, debased men dreamed up by novelist David Foster Wallace.
“I’m definitely attracted a lot to the darker side of things — not horribly dark, but a more realistic sense,” Krasinski says. “That book was such an obsession of mine, truly, ever since college. And the fact that no one else would do it just left me to think, ‘Well, maybe I should do it.’ ”
Krasinski, who also appears in the film (along with Timothy Hutton), says he’s in negotiations with several distributors and hopes “Brief Interviews” will be released in the fall. But for now, he says, that’s it for writing and directing. “I’d never say never ... but I think I’m still working on being a single threat before a triple threat.”
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