Jonah Hill on playing with guns at ’21 Jump Street’
Jonah Hill
NEW YORK – No one will ever mistake Jonah Hill for a macho action star.
But the portly comic actor gets to engage in more than his share of gunplay in his new action comedy “21 Jump Street.” Appearing opposite hunky, handsome Channing Tatum in the TV remake about youthful LAPD cops going undercover at a high school to bust drug dealers, Hill got to sling weapons on screen for the first time in his career.
But, as he told it during a press day hosted by Columbia Pictures, he wasn’t entirely comfortable handling all that firepower. On the other hand, Tatum (a veteran of “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” and other action fare) handles guns with aplomb.
“I’m pretty comfortable with weapons,” Tatum told reporters. “I’ve done a lot of work with them in films.” Then he laughed. “But this person next to me (Hill) has the worst gun safety that I’ve ever been around in my entire life.”
In his own defense, Hill explained, “I had a problem because there’s a guy on set whose job it is to give you a gun, right? It’s a real gun and it’s loaded with blanks. And I had not been around guns before. But I went with a cop and trained how to shoot guns. I’m actually a pretty good shot. And so this guy was responsible for giving me a gun, so my thing was like …”
“I’m going to point it at your (groin) and pull the trigger,” Tatum chimed in.
“Right,” said Hill, “and I’m like, ‘ it had better not be loaded because I don’t want to die, I don’t want him to die, I don’t want anyone to die. And you’re the guy whose job it is to make sure nobody dies. And that’s a very serious job.
“So every time he gave me a gun,” Hill said, “I pointed at his genitalia and I pulled the trigger. And, I was like, you’re never going to accidentally hand me a loaded gun because you don’t want to not be able to have kids ever again.
“Actually, I think it’s crazy, handing real guns to actors,” Hill said. “I think that’s the scariest, weirdest energy to put on a movie set. We would joke around a lot, but obviously when it came to real gun safety we were serious about it.”
- Dennis King