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(Photos & Interview) Man About Town: Jonathan Groff in the new Matrix film

[ Written on December 23 2021 by rory ]

Jonathan did another photohsoot this time for Man About Town to promote Matrix. Check out the photoshoot in our gallery and read the interview below:

Jonathan Groff has frozen and keeps tripping out on my screen. We both laugh, appreciative of the irony given we’re catching up with the frozen star about his role in the much-anticipated new matrix film. Once we finally overcome technical issues, the 36-year-old spots we are both proud owners of exactly the same beyoncé merch – a black sweatshirt with ‘surfboard’ written in pink. We discuss groff’s incredible musical career to date and how it all began before turning our attention to the matrix resurrections.

On how he spent COVID
Lockdown was kind of life-changing. I got a house right before COVID right near my dad’s horse farm. My dad trains and races horses for a living. I knew I wanted to always go back to Pennsylvania at some point in my life to be near my family. And when I was living there with my friend Katie during COVID, I had this dream in the back of my brain through the years that I wanted to turn my dad’s horse farm into an artist retreat. Being there and re-falling in love with the Amish landscape and the stars and nature fast-tracked this whole thing. It was a huge realigning moment for me. I also did a movie club with my friends where we would watch classic movies and we did it for an entire year. Bertoluci’s 1900 was a very polarising movie. I remember there was some members of the group that really went with that, and then there were others that were not going with it.

On how his upbringing shaped his acting career
It’s a combination of growing up in this idyllic, natural environment where the summers were spent with my brother and our friends putting on plays in my dad’s barn. I was Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz there and we were running through the fields and it was very free, open and creative. Then on the flip side, I understand how much doing community theatre and high school theatre. Acting was a culmination of joy and at the same time, it was great kind of therapy and an outlet for self-expression so growing up in that conservative area allowed me great freedom and creativity, but it also was quite repressing in certain ways, which I think is why I reached for acting.

Read the Full Interview @ Man About Town

(Photos & Interview) GQ Hype: Jonathan Groff is trying to be more like Keanu, too

[ Written on December 23 2021 by rory ]

The Tony Award-winning actor is the new Agent Smith in The Matrix Resurrections. He meets with GQ for a workout, a beer, and a wide-ranging conversation about his attempts to connect with the world around him. Check out the photoshoot in our gallery and read the interview below:

“You can quit at any time,” Jonathan Groff informs me with the paternal kindness of a guidance counsellor, and I am at least 80 per cent serious when I inform him that I will never quit. A proud correspondent of GQ always wants to be up for an adventure, even if that adventure is only “going to the gym,” and specifically “going to the gym with the new Agent Smith, to learn firsthand how he trained to fight Keanu Reeves for The Matrix Resurrections, the latest iteration of the iconic action franchise.” Groff’s nickname on set was ‘The Savage’, owing to the intensity with which he embraced the physicality of the fight scenes. He’s always looked like a cartoon prince, but Matrix prep has blessed him with core strength. Meanwhile, this correspondent has the muscle tone of a candy cane, and a pathological allergy to bicep curls.

Nevertheless, here we are within the well-lit expanse of Manhattan’s Chelsea Piers Fitness gym, changing side by side in the locker rooms and preparing for what a publicist has described as a quick workout but in reality is three sets of four circuits comprising three separate routines, which in conjunction will unlock the latent potential of muscles and tendons I didn’t know existed. Groff is the expert here, though he’d never weight trained before he landed his part in the Matrix sequel. He’d never filmed any kind of fight scene, period, and was mildly stunned when director Lana Wachowski offered him the role of Smith, one of action cinema’s more indelible villains and also a peerless ass-kicker. “It seemed so far from what I had done or what I was – I couldn’t understand why she asked me to do this, really,” he says. Read the Full Interview @ GQ

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