New Girl’s Jake Johnson: ‘They were right to ask me to lose weight – I came in tubby!’

There tend to be two paths available to an actor who faces the end of a long-running and star-making sitcom. The first is performing a vanishing act, never to be heard of again except for a single TMZ article, decades later, attesting to just how “unrecognisable” they’ve become. The second is super stardom, by way of tentpole franchises and often, but not always, comic-book adaptations.

When leaving New Girl after seven years as its lovable couch potato Nick Miller, Jake Johnson gave the latter a go. He dipped his feet into the world of blockbusters with films like Jurassic World and Tom Cruise’s The Mummy, but found the waters tepid. Toxic, even.

“Have you ever seen a salmon that’s been pulled out of the river for too long?” Johnson says now, his face contorting into a grimace. “It’s not a happy ending.

Keep that salmon in the stream.” This salmon’s particular stream, though, is drying up. “Mid-level budget movies...”

sighs the actor, sounding nostalgic way past his 48 years. “Right now there’s two types of movie happening, and that is the billion-dollar franchise and the super cool indie. But there used to be a middle-type of movie where you just go, ‘Man, that was a fun 90 minutes.’

It’s not the coolest thing that’s ever been shot. But it’s also not 75 A-list actors and IPs coming together, which I’m glad we have for theatres – but there used to be a whole middle class of movies and they’re disappearing.” open image in galleryGame, set, match: Johnson and Aaron Chen star in ‘The Dink’ (AP)Johnson is doing his part to fight back, with his new film sitting squarely in that bracket.

Something of a cross between Happy Gilmore and Dodgeball, The Dink follows Dusty, a failed tennis prodigy who picks up the much-ridiculed sport of pickleball following a wrist injury (cue the masturbation jokes). It’s funny, with a big heart and an easy-to-root-for protagonist who stumbles his way through a three-act redemption arc. It is, to borrow Johnson’s phrase, the exact sort of movie you leave thinking, “Man, that was a fun 90 minutes.”

(In fact, it clocks in at 102.) Incidentally, Johnson had planned to carry on with pickleball after wrapping The Dink – he and his buddy, the actor Justin Long, went so far as to buy rackets – but he quickly got distracted. “I’m a phase guy,” he says now, by way of explanation.

His latest phase involves great big gargantuan weights and “seeing how much heavy stuff I can lift over my head – you know, as you do as you get older.”No matter how old he gets, Johnson will forever be known to some as the slacker with a heart of gold from New Girl, the guy that uses a paper bag instead of a wallet and kisses like a coal miner coming home to his wife. Johnson doesn’t mind the association.

“Nick is the closest character I’ve ever played to my comedic rhythm and to what I find funny in life,” he says. “That tone of Nick is so close to my heart.” “My dream was always to be in this business, and it’s not like I moved to LA and a week and a half later I was on New Girl,” he says.

“There were a lot of years of this old club failing. I would walk into auditions and I would see on their faces, ‘Oh my God, we hate what you’re doing.’ And I was like, ‘Man, this s*** is not working.’

With Liz [Merriweather, the creator], it was the opposite. She wanted more.” Anyway, it would be different if he were to be indelibly linked with, say, Jeffrey Dahmer, Johnson laughs.

“So yes, great... Call me Nick on the subway when I’m 80! Awesome, man.

I lived a dream life because of that son of a bitch.”open image in galleryTV Royalty: Zooey Deschanel, Prince and Johnson in the hit sitcom ‘New Girl' (Fox)Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 dayNew subscribers only. £9.

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after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.Try for freeADVERTISEMENT.

If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.To this day, Johnson will find himself in situations that feel so Nick-esque that he wants to ring Merriweather right then and there.

Just last night, he decided to take a bath in his hotel room at one o’clock in the morning. “As I was filling it, I just wanted to call Liz and be like, ‘Just so you know, I’m going through the ugliest phase that my body has ever been in, and I’m about to soak the whole thing in a tub of soup. And I wanted you to know that.’”

On that note, when I ask how he reflects on the studio’s request that he lose weight for the role of Nick, he says: “I think Fox was right! I came in tubby! Who doesn’t love chips and tortillas?”

But wasn’t the dad-bod part of Nick’s appeal? “Not at the beginning,” Johnson laughs. “It’s not what Fox wanted.”

The way Johnson’s career has gone – swerving away, tyre marks o