Words By Zach Collier
Jonathan Daviss is an introspective actor with a philosophical approach to his craft. An avid reader, he’s able to powerfully articulate his thoughts in a way that’s accessible and rife with meaning while emphasizing the magic of cinema.
When I linked up with Jonathan Daviss, he was getting ready to head to the airport. The star of the runaway Netflix hit Outer Banks immediately impressed me with the reason for his trip.
“I’m going out to Houston to do something with my old high school,” he said humbly. Hailing from the small town of Conroe, just north of Houston, Jonathan Daviss fits the description of the idyllic hometown hero: a former cornerback and free safety in a state where football reigns supreme who left home to become a successful actor and returns to give back to the community.
It felt very Hallmark or 90s-era WB to me, but I was all for it. Especially since Jonathan is disarmingly sincere. Nothing about it felt inauthentic or self-aggrandizing.
“I’m working with Body Armor,” he explained. “We're going to be gifting a lot of product to the athletic programs. And then I'll be doing something like an alumni thing for their first home game of the season this year, too.I'll be going out on the field to help with the coin flip and some stuff like that.”
He explained that he didn’t really want to help with the coin flip, because he didn’t want the attention to be on him. “I just kind of wanted to come down and donate to the athletic program.
And then the faculty were like, oh, and then you could do this and you could do that!” He laughed at the memory. “And I was like, okay. So it turned into a whole thing.”
Despite it becoming a whole thing, I could tell he was genuinely excited to return. He shared fond memories of his time in Conroe. “I made varsity as a corner. But I think I really liked free safety because I kind of liked being able to see the whole field and it really lets you play. It's like being another linebacker sometimes. But I played most of my career as a cornerback. That was fun. I like both, but I don't know. I don't think I could pick one. I like both.”
He preferred defense to offense. “I played running back for like a game my seventh grade year. And the first play I got in at running back, they didn't block and I got utterly smacked by the defensive lineman.” Laughing, he added, “It was about that moment where I was like, I think I'm on the defensive side of the ball.”
As a high school theater kid turned rockstar turned 30-something journalist, I was a little confused at how varsity cornerback Jonathan Daviss ended up an actor. I’m smart enough to know that classic Hollywood high school stereotypes don’t exist. It’s not a nerd vs jock thing. Really, what I was curious about is that usually sports require so much dedication and commitment that most players are laser focused on a college scholarship of some kind – and a potential NCAA career. But to Jonathan, sports was always a hobby. Sure, he had the physical capability and the talent, but it wasn’t his dream. “I think I always wanted to be an actor just cause I was always into movies,” he explained.
“I wanted to figure out how to do this at a young age. But then I played football. And then once you get to varsity football, that kind of cuts into theater time. And then I was doing debate at the same time, too. And I was doing prose and poetry competitions. I was doing a lot in high school at the same time.”
He was trying to audition and do TV and theater and movies all while keeping his grades up, and his game up, and improving in the literary arts. “Especially at that age, I would spread myself thin. You think when you're young, you can do everything. You're going to have to prioritize what you really want at the end of the day.”
Football was never his first priority. But all of his friends played, so it was social. And it helped him develop physically. “I figured like, hey, most actors I see that work a lot are in shape. So it's probably just a good thing to do,” he laughed.
I kept having flashbacks to my own high school experience. Using football to improve as a theater kid is such a wild concept that even now I can’t help but chuckle at the thought. But Jonathan Daviss is a different breed. He’s driven, and he does what it takes to achieve his dreams.
“My dad was really into movies. So that's the reason I'm really into movies is because me and my dad will watch movies together. He got told by somebody that Craigslist will have little auditions that you can do. So we found a little local commercial audition on Craigslist, walked my eight-year-old self in there, and, you know, the ball kind of rolled from there. The love of it kind of just sparked.”
Big breaks are always made up of lots of little breaks. Age of Summer was one of those breaks for Jonathan. It was called Kook at the time, but it was set in the late 80s, early 90s. A slice of life film about a group of junior life guards, Jonathan points to it as a defining time in his career that directly led to Outer Banks. “I shot that on Manhattan Beach in LA. I was 16 at the time. And I'd never surfed. And they were like, we want you to be able to surf. I got the part, I came out there. And that's where I learned the basics of surfing,” he told me. “And it was like a very beach-centered film. So I could definitely see the creators of Outer Banks, after I auditioned, just kind of looking at that reel and being like, Oh, he's already done the beach film. This is not going to be too much of a stretch for him to come over and do this now.”
He loved working with Peter Stormare on Age of Summer. “I got to see a lot of seasoned veteran actors, acting in ways I had never seen. And that kind of put a little fire in me.”
In the latest season of Outer Banks, Jonathan particularly loved episode five. “I didn't like filming it, but I liked what's going on in it. I think it was tough for me and the co-star who I'm in it with.
We're on a little duo mission. I don't want to give it away. But that mission – filming it was rough,” he said with a laugh.
He told me that the cut of the season finale was over two hours long. “I’m interested in all sides of this industry. You know, you find the story in the edit. That's where the actual way the audience is going to perceive the project taking place,” he said.
“The acting is a big part of it. But how it's edited is the most important step. That's the way you absorb that information – the way you perceive it as an audience member. You give a lot of yourself away when you finish doing your scene in the day, and you leave it up to the director and the editors.”
Jonathan dove into the importance of music, of sound design, of color grading and correction. I could tell that he really knew his stuff. This was a man who was absolutely delighted by the magic of cinema. Everything about it, from start to finish. I wasn’t surprised at all to learn that Jonathan was still writing, just like he was in high school.
“I definitely want to create my own projects, you know, in the future and write,” Jonathan said. “I'm writing a short now, and I'm writing a film now. I think it's good for all artists to exercise that part of themselves if they can, you know? I think we all want to tell our own stories. I definitely want to. I'm still writing and reading and doing my own thing. Taking my practice as it comes.”
“If you want to do a thing, you start, you learn, you grow, you try, you fail, you try again.”
Jonathan said that with his writing, he’s learning to let go of himself again. “When I learned to act, I had to learn to let go of how I was seen by people – to just be in the moment,” he said. “And it's kind of the same thing with writing on a different level where you have to let go, because once you give art away, it belongs to the world.”
One of the things that came up most in our conversation was the idea of trust. To Jonathan, movies are magical because of the amount of trust involved. The writer gives the script away. The actors take the script and follow direction, and then give their portrayal to the director. The director hands everything over to the editor. And so on and so on. A giant network of trust.
“You just have to trust that the next person knows what they're going to do,” he said with a smile.
What narrative themes excite Jonathan Daviss, the writer? “I was just reading this article about Hollywood's obsession with ambition. And I think most of the stories that we create in America and in Hollywood have a lot to do with a character's ambition. We don't really have characters that don't have some kind of ambition – whether that's for the positive or for the negative. Whether it's to see their ambition achieved or to see their ambition be their downfall, you know? I've really been, like, locking in on what that means in every story.”
Turns out, we had both seen Alien: Romulus the night before, and he began to reference it with enthusiasm. “The whole plot starts because of ambition. How ambition has destroyed a society, and then the kids have to leave their circumstances.”
Jonathan delivered a plot twist when he revealed his desire to make slice of life films that aren’t focused on ambition. He wasn’t sure how to pull it off, but he liked the idea of portraying a person's mundane life and showing them being a happy person.
“I think we have a lot of the idea that if you don't have ambition, then you're not a full person. Like every person is unhappy if they haven't achieved a certain degree of ambition with their life. I've really been digging in on that recently. I'm about to be 25. I'm 24 right now, where I'm about to hit that quarter life crisis, and I’m asking myself questions.”
He referenced The Big Lebowski and the Japanese film Perfect Day as movies that point towards what he wants to achieve. As we left writing and directing behind and started diving into his acting philosophy, he was able to passionately and enthusiastically weave thoughts together about Russian theater and McCarthyism; Chekhov’s Three Sisters and subtext; the history and implementation of the microphone and its effect on acting portrayals in film.
As he spoke it became abundantly clear that I would be an avid listener of a Jonathan Daviss film analysis podcast. He’s 100% my speed.
Despite his thorough and analytical breakdown, it seemed to me that everything was about magic at the end of the day for Jonathan Daviss. The magic of trust and community. The magic of imagination. The magic of childlike joy and wonder.
“At the end of the day it's really just an exercise in making the imagination so vivid that it affects you in a physical way,” he said.