Jonah Hill

Jonah Hill (born December 20, 1983, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) is an American actor, director, and comedian who became known for locating a core of humanity inside clownish characters and later proved to be equally adept in serious roles.

Hill grew up in an upper-middle-class neighbourhood of Los Angeles. His mother was a costume designer, and his father was a tour accountant for the band Guns N’ Roses. His younger sister, Beanie Feldstein, also became a noted actor. As a child, he entertained himself by writing scripts that he thought would be suitable for the animated TV series The Simpsons. He attended Brentwood School and later transferred to Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences, graduating in 2002. Hill then enrolled in the University of Colorado at Boulder but after a year transferred to The New School in New York City. While there he wrote comedic plays and staged them in a bar, gaining a small following. Reportedly, a friendship with Dustin Hoffman’s son led to Hill’s being cast in his first movie, I Heart Huckabees (2004).

Hill had a small role in Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), the first of several successful comedies with the filmmaker. In 2007 he had a minor part in Apatow’s Knocked Up before appearing in his breakthrough film, Superbad, in which he and costar Michael Cera played unpopular high schoolers hoping to have their first sexual experience before graduation. Hill continued acting in numerous comedies, including Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) and Apatow’s Funny People (2009), and he took the part of a hapless music executive tasked with escorting an out-of-control rock star (Russell Brand) to a concert venue in Get Him to the Greek (2010). Hill essayed his first straight role in Moneyball (2011), based on a book by Michael Lewis. In the sports drama he played an earnest baseball statistician advising Oakland Athletics manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) on how to assemble a winning team on a shoestring budget, and, for his mesmerizing performance, Hill was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor.

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Hill won praise for his engaging portrayal of an inept undercover cop in the 1980s parody film 21 Jump Street (2012), which also starred Channing Tatum, and in the sequel, 22 Jump Street (2014). During this time he also appeared in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012). In 2013 Hill played an exaggerated version of himself in the horror comedy This Is the End, about the apocalypse, and portrayed the drug-addicted sidekick of the title character (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Martin Scorsese’s dark comedy The Wolf of Wall Street, for which he earned a second Oscar nomination.

Hill later played a journalist interviewing a self-serving mass murderer (James Franco) in True Story (2015) and won praise for his portrayal of an unscrupulous arms dealer in War Dogs (2016). His performance as the charismatic sponsor of alcoholic quadriplegic cartoonist John Callahan (Joaquin Phoenix) in Gus Van Sant’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018) was also acclaimed. Hill’s directorial debut, Mid90s (2018), which he also wrote, was a well-received coming-of-age story about a troubled youth caught up in a skateboarding group. He starred in the innovative psychological-exploration TV series Maniac (2018) and had a comedic role in the Key West-set The Beach Bum (2019).

Hill later joined an all-star cast in Don’t Look Up (2021), a dramedy about an impending comet strike that will destroy Earth. He also voiced characters in a number of animated movies, notably How to Train Your Dragon (2010) and its sequels, Megamind (2010), and The Lego Movie (2014) and its sequels. In 2022 Hill directed Stutz, a documentary about his psychotherapist, Phil Stutz.