John Magaro Will Do (Almost) Anything to Get the Role Right

It’s a quiet afternoon in New York City, two days before Thanksgiving, and “September 5” star John Magaro and I are settled into a bright table at an East Village restaurant for drinks and professional chatter. A few feet away, a group of peppy young women are sitting down for their own mid-afternoon tipple, chatting about movies they’ve caught recently. “Have you seen ‘Wicked’?” one giddily asks her friends. They all have.

With a wry smile, Magaro leans an inch or so toward them, not close enough for the group to see or hear, but just enough to get a laugh out of me, and stage-whispers, “Have you seen ‘September 5’?”

Hire John Magaro for your film, and he’s going to work hard for it, every step of the way. That extends beyond winking recommendations, down to nuts-and-bolts prep and bringing his full self to each and every day. He’ll learn how to play the drums or the guitar. He’ll go on a “frontier boot camp” to approximate old-time living. He’ll lose 40 pounds. He’ll sit in a tiny broadcast van for weeks at a time. And if his “First Cow” director Kelly Reichardt needs him? Oh, he’ll “hand out sandwiches on set.”

All that preparation, all that dedication, it comes from the same place: Magaro cares. His job means something to him. That’s obvious onscreen, and it’s obvious when he’s talking about it. His latest role, as real-life broadcasting legend Geoffrey Mason in Tim Fehlbaum’s gripping and fact-based drama “September 5,” is one of the most meaningful of his career. It’s also some of the best work he’s done yet.

The film follows the ABC Sports news team who — quite unexpectedly — were thrust into profound human tragedy and brain-breaking news history during the horrific events of the 1972 Munich Olympics. Magaro’s Geoff is a young producer embarking on his first day in the on-location newsroom when tragedy strikes, as the terrorist organization Black September takes members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage in the middle of an otherwise lovely day in the Olympic Village. With their new-fangled live broadcast technology, the ABC Sports crew is tasked with reporting on the tragic story as it unfolds in real-time.

‘September 5’©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

Magaro’s Mason is at the very center of unfathomable events, which he must then share with the world. It’s a fascinating, tough story, with scads of juicy roles (Peter Sarsgaard, Ben Chaplin, and Leonie Benesch co-star). None are better, or more difficult, than Magaro’s.

“I have a tough time motivating myself to do something that I can’t find something in it,” Magaro said. “I remember when I was just auditioning for stuff, I would have trouble booking things if I didn’t like it or I couldn’t find a connection to it or some value in dedicating my time to it, even though at that point, I needed any job possible. I had to pay bills. So that was sort of a detriment. But I have a tough time motivating myself to deliver something that’s good if I don’t really believe in it. I’ve been lucky that there’s been a bit of a law of attraction in the sense that the things that I’ve done, for the most part, the things that have been successful, have been the things that I’ve really responded to.”

There’s also a little bit of serendipity at play. “September 5” came to Magaro at a time when he was particularly open to a film that is, in some ways, a workplace drama (just with, you know, huge stakes). He was starring in and producing the Shane Atkinson film “La Roy, Texas” in New Mexico — “a fun, dark comedy in the vein of Coen brothers, great reviews, not very seen, but I highly recommend it if anyone’s so inclined to search for it” — when he got the script. At the time, he found himself “putting out fires a lot,” including having to re-cast an actor late in the game.  

“We were on the verge of getting shut down, there was no time to pause,” he recalled. “We really had to find someone, and so I found myself playing scenes and then them calling cut and then getting on the phone being like, ‘We need to find an actor!’ I think something about putting out the fires, this kind of crisis situation made the crisis of ‘September 5’ resonate with me.”

The attached talent helped too: Sean Penn producing, Sarsgaard starring. And when he read the script? “It really just really hit me. I was learning stuff I didn’t know about that event,” he said. “These ordinary people doing extraordinary things, people who were ill-prepared for what happened, just ordinary people who didn’t even realize they were changing history forever. That’s always an intriguing story. There’s a lot of rich drama there.”

The confines of the story were a bit scary: Not only does it take place mostly over just one day, but the majority of the film is set inside the cramped quarters of the ABC Sports studio. “Part of my concern and my questions for Tim were: How do we sustain this in one location? Is this going to be captivating enough? Is this going to be too inside baseball?” he said. “But Tim reassured me that we would get there, and he really was more concerned about us as actors being authentic, as opposed to reaching for drama. That’s what I wanted to do too.”

‘September 5’©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

Magaro is the last person to reach for drama, and the authenticity of what Fehlbaum wanted to accomplish grabbed him. “When an actor does crazy shit, it’s a lot easier for them to pop out of the screen and people start talking about them,” Magaro said. “It’s a lot riskier in a way to sort of say the words and be true to the situation and be honest and authentic. I like that kind of stuff. That’s the kind of film that I respond to. Tim and I were on the same page about that authenticity.”

Fehlbaum might not be the most obvious pick for this kind of film, a journalistic drama with shades of “Spotlight” and “All the President’s Men” to it, as the young Swiss filmmaker previously helmed features more in the sci-fi space. Was Magaro worried about that at all?

“I mean, I’ve had this happen before,” he said. “It happened last year with Celine Song, Celine was ‘untested.’ She’s a playwright. I’d seen her play that was here at the New York Theatre Workshop, ‘Endlings.’ Very different than what ‘Past Lives’ is, but what I saw in there was a passion and an eye for beautiful storytelling, which I think is infused in ‘Past Lives.’ Tim, in his earlier work, it’s sci-fi, but it’s world-building. Sci-fi, that’s what it is, you build an entire universe out of nothing, and that takes a tremendous amount of specificity, and that’s what Tim has. And talking to him, I knew that he was focused, so that gave me an idea that he knew what he was doing, even though this was different.”

He’s not overstating that level of specificity: Fehlbaum wanted the video equipment and production machinery on the set to be from the time period, and usable to boot. “It has to be exact, the machines have to work, everything has to be precise,” Magaro said. “And in his precision, he was able to give his actors a lot of room to play. … When we got to moments where it felt like we weren’t doing what our mission statement was about being authentic, we would be able to talk about the acting of it all and find how to make it what we were going for. He really believed in his actors.”

Since making his big screen debut in, funnily enough, Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” back in 2005, Magaro has worked with many directors. He has a tremendous amount of love for many of them, and a few examples of the kind of people he doesn’t want to collaborate with.

“I’ve had directors who direct you through a megaphone, and you’re 25 miles away and it’s like, ‘Well, how the hell are we going to find anything here?’ and then you pretty quickly realize they just want you to hit this moment and they’re not going to let you stop until you hit that moment, even though it’s utterly false and ridiculous and fake, and 90 percent of the time the audience sees right through it. There are those directors out there,” Magaro said. “But the best directors I’ve worked with, [Todd] Haynes, [Adam] McKay, Kelly, Celine, Tim, and I’m leaving people out of that list, they aren’t like that. They’re collaborators, they’re storytellers. They want to be in there in the mud with you to figure it out.”

For Magaro, “figuring it out” means lots of hands-on work and research. It does not mean Method acting, however people think about that these days.

“Everyone does their own things, and every job I approach differently,” he said. “Some require very little research, some require more. I always like to encourage directors to send me whatever is inspiring them, whether that be books, movies, music, pictures, whatever. And, yes, I hate the word ‘Method.’ I think it’s a bullshit term, and anyone who is going around claiming to be Method is kind of selfish in a lot of ways. We were just talking about collaboration, and what is thought to be Method is the antithesis of being collaborative.”

‘September 5’©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

He was quick to note, however, “If you’re playing a piano player or you’re playing a drummer or something like that, something that’s very technical, I think it’s your job as an actor to try and learn it as much as possible.” (Magaro has done both: he learned how to play drums for David Chase’s “Not Fade Away,” and just learned how to play piano to star as jazz musician Keith Jarrett in Ido Fluk’s “Girl from Koln.”)

For “September 5,” Magaro had to take on a different kind of research process. “What became abundantly clear in the conversations with Geoff Mason was, ‘Get in a control room, because if you don’t know how to do that, this ain’t going to work,’” he said.

Magaro went to CBS Sports, and they let him sit in their production trailer behind Madison Square Garden as the team put together a number of live sports broadcasts. “I went for multiple weeks, just to sit in the room, just to learn what it is,” he said. “For Sunday football, they do two games in a day, so you’re sitting there for roughly six hours, and you’re just watching how they do it. It’s such a rhythm. It’s such specificity to how they call it, and there’s such a language to it. It’s intense, but it’s quiet, and it’s focused, and it’s almost casual in a way.”

The experience didn’t just assist Magaro’s performance, but greatly impacted the way he thinks about and consumes live television. “That model that happened then continues to be the model,” he said. “And for good or bad,  when something tragic happens, like when you watch an NFL game and someone gets a concussion or something, they have to keep going. You may want to stop, but they’re trained. You just keep calling the show.”

In the film, the news team needs to make split-second decisions that involve not just life or death issues but life or death issues that literally no one ever had to consider putting on live television before the events of September 5. Like, can you show someone being shot on live TV? Should you? Would you? At best, they’ve got a commercial break to discuss the problem. How can that ever be enough? Well, it has to be.

“At home, a commercial break is an eternity, you’re like, ‘When the fuck is the show going to start again?’ But in that room, a commercial break goes by in the blink of an eye,” Magaro said. “We tried to capture that, and when I call a commercial break, we jump out in the hall, and we try to break down philosophical, ethical questions in a couple minutes, and obviously, there’s no real resolution to them. You come up with some sort of tenuous plan and then move forward, and that’s what Geoff and the team were doing on that day. They couldn’t think of the consequences of it, and what has now become the traditional way of calling breaking news. They just had to make a decision.”

Magaro spent lots of time with the real-life Mason, and has nothing but admiration for the man. How does Mason think about those events, all these years on? “It’s very vivid. It’s very lucid, very rational, I’d say,” the actor said. “The mark is still very present on him. The closest thing I can equate it to is how maybe we feel about 9/11. It’s one of those moments you remember where you were, you remember the room, you remember the people around you. It’s a very clear moment.”

Still, Magaro said that Mason remained very “job-oriented” when discussing the events with the actor. “It wasn’t about the emotions. It wasn’t about judgments on what they did or what has become of the media. It was about what he did on that day,” Magaro said. “I think, for him, that is probably a healthier way of looking at it, because this movie is trying to show how media was forever changed on this day. I hope people will have conversations about where we’re at in our own consumption of these horrible events.”

Magaro said he didn’t feel the need to interrogate Mason’s emotional state. Staying focused on the job was actually the most useful thing, asking Mason what he did that day, not necessarily how he felt about it. “[For Geoff], it was, ‘Do your job. Stay focused. Stay on the air. If you’re going to cry about it, do it when you’re back at your hotel room,’ which is what he did with Don Ohlmeyer, his colleague,” Magaro said. “That was more helpful for me. It became, again, an ordinary guy doing an extraordinary thing, not realizing how he was changing history. It’s his first time on that big of a stage, and he is the person who changes history forever along with his colleagues. That’s insane.”

Magaro shot the film last year, and has been typically busy ever since — shooting “The Agency” in London, bouncing between New York and LA for “September 5” commitments, out to Cincinnati to shoot Reichardt’s latest — and now he’s back in NYC, “in dad mode.” Magaro’s girls — his wife, Janice Hong, and their daughter — come up a lot in conversation, be it as it applies to what kind of stuff they watch (Hong is a big TV person, Magaro can’t quite keep up, though they’re both very busy watching animated stuff with their toddler) or how much he misses them when he’s on a job.

‘First Cow’

It helps that he’s got other kinds of family to lean on during those work hours, like Reichardt and her crew. Magaro recently spent three days on Reichardt’s upcoming “The Mastermind,” also starring Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim, Hope Davis, and Bill Camp. The film is tantalizingly billed as “an audacious art heist amidst the backdrop of the Vietnam War.”

“It was such a homecoming just being on set with these people, mostly the same crew [from ‘First Cow’], they all come back to work with her,” he said. “There’s something familial about that set. And there’s also just a brilliance at work. I mean, Kelly is brilliant. I’m really excited to see ‘The Mastermind.’ It’s going to be fantastic. I’m already confident in that. Because she has a true appreciation for cinema at the expense of maybe having a popular appeal at times, her appreciation for cinema is evident in the execution. You can’t help but be infected by that passion.”

I mentioned that Reichardt has managed to escape a persistent line of questioning that has, thankfully, fallen off in recent years when it comes to our best indie filmmakers: hey, when are you gonna make a Marvel movie? He laughed. “We were joking around about doing something like that, but I think she would either quit or get fired within a week,” he said. “She just couldn’t deal with the bullshit. And that’s cool! I love that about her.”

Reichardt has cultural cachet in other spaces, like the beloved HBO series “The Other Two.” “She mentioned [that] on this show, there are these characters who are trying to get some cred, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, go do a Kelly Reichardt film,’” he said. “So I like that she’s been put into pop culture as that person. But that’s not why I did it, the first thing I did with her, it was just because I thought it was a cool thing and I loved her films, but it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, this will give me street cred.’ She was just a filmmaker I wanted to work with.”

And, no, Magaro is not interested in “street cred” these days. That’s not why he does this. “I think there’s many actors who do that, and there have been things that I’ve done to get some sort of whatever cred, and whenever you do that, I think you end up falling on your face,” he said. “That is never a reason to do something. It’s a reason a lot of people do, that and money, but I think you’ll always be let down in the end.”

Asking a performer what they love about acting is always a tricky proposition, but Magaro is so clear about the things he doesn’t want from his profession, that turning it toward what he does want is a natural enough next step. What does he love about acting, after nearly two decades of doing it?

“I think the love of acting is ever-changing, and I think that’s what makes it interesting,” Magaro said. “I think the reasons you start as an actor are not what they are many years later. I think sometimes you need to be reminded or change your perspective of why you’re doing it. When I first started, I did it as a kid. It was a hobby. It was a way to let off steam and not annoy the shit out of my parents. I was a second child, my brother was the golden boy, and I was the annoying little brother, so it gave me a chance to get on stage and have people clap for me. And then it was a way to meet girls, and then I didn’t know what the hell else I was going to do with my life.”

‘Not Fade Away’©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

Magaro’s parents were both public school teachers in Ohio, so while he said there “wasn’t really a lot of art in the household,” all the Magaros did like movies. (His “golden boy” brother is now a hedge fund manager, and his brother’s biggest fan; he let him stay in his apartment while he was filming “The Big Short” and taught Magaro everything he needed to know about the financial world.) Spielberg was big. His mom would take him to the local theater, and his dad was the kind of guy who would illegally copy stuff on his own Betamax and VHS players. He remembers watching movies like “Jaws” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” with his father, “not deep cuts, but iconic films.”

In high school, Magaro got tight with a dude who turned him on to more challenging stuff, lots of Stanley Kubrick. “So I’m in high school, and I started to watch Kubrick, so I started to get it, but I still didn’t really appreciate it,” he said.

Magaro decided, “against my father’s hopes,” to get a degree in acting at Pittsburgh’s Point Park University. “It was there that I really started to understand that acting can be an art and that theater is an art and that it can change people,” he said. “I think before, I thought it could educate people, but it wasn’t until college that I realized it could change people, it can change history. I go to college, and I have four years to just read and watch. I found myself surrounded by other kids who had gone to performing arts high schools, and they knew who Ibsen was and they knew who Chekhov was. And I was like, ‘Who the fuck?’”

Magaro paused before this next bit. He shrugged. “So I felt stupid,” he said. “I found a need to know who these people were. I started reading, and I read a bunch of plays, and then AFI’s 100 best films came out, and worked my way through those, and then I continued on to more.”

It wasn’t just the screen that did it for Magaro either, he also got very into live theater, and benefitted from lots of great New York actors coming through Pittsburgh with their shows. “I watched this actor, who’s still around, his name is Ray Thomas,” he said. “He did ‘Topdog/Underdog,’ Suzan-Lori Parks’ play, in Pittsburgh with Billy Porter at this regional theater. What he did on stage was just life. It was so honest. It was so pure. It made me feel like, ‘That’s the kind of actor I want to be.’ And then I had a focus.”

Magaro said he became committed to being as good as he could possibly be. He started doing regional plays in Pittsburgh, got his equity card, did an original Adam Rapp play called “Gompers,” came to New York, got an agent (just a commercial agent, he notes).

“Then it became about being an actor, being an artist, being a theater artist,” he said. “Then I fell into indie film, and then it was about the love of indie film. Now I have a kid, and now it’s also about kind of making money. It’s constantly evolving, the reasons you do it. But at the core of it, the idea of being a storyteller, telling a story, being up there, being fearless, allowing yourself to be a fool is what it’s about.”

And while Magaro, dedicated indie guy, still very much in it for love of the game (and the hope of keeping his family fed, too) worries about the future of the industry, he can’t help but still get romantic about the whole thing. “There definitely still is a high about it,” he said. “When you’re on set and it works, when you’re figuring it out and when you do a take that really works and resonates and you look to your director and you’re like, ‘Yes,’ it’s an amazing feeling, and it’s something you can’t really describe to people who don’t do it, but you get why people want to be around it.”

It’s hard work, but if you’re as good as John Magaro, it’s worth it.

Paramount Pictures will release “September 5” in limited theaters today, Friday, December 13, with a wider rollout to follow.