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‘Self Reliance’s Jake Johnson Talks Inspiration Taken From Owen Wilson, Hollywood’s New Normal & Going Down A Road Less Traveled With His Career
For better or worse, Jake Johnson knows who he is. As a “45-year-old white dude,” he says, he knows that opportunities to direct for the big screen aren’t going to come along ofte…
Debuting on Hulu today, following a one-night theatrical engagement via Neon, the film stars Johnson as Tommy, an ordinary Angeleno who is swept up into an unexpected adventure when he’s offered a million dollars to participate in a reality series for the dark web, which sees him on the run from people out to kill him. While the title Self Reliance refers to Tommy’s need to rely first and foremost on himself amidst his dangerous, oddball journey, it’s also an allusion to the famed transcendentalist essay by philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, which Johnson read at age 15, when he abruptly decided to drop out of school for a year. Seeing him riff off of this group reminds one of the ensemble comedy sensibility embraced by the likes of Judd Apatow and Nicholas Stoller from the late ’90s on, in such modern classics as Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which can very rarely be found on the big screen anymore.
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