Jake Johnson on Pickleball Comedy 'The Dink' and Life After 'New Girl'

You might assume that Jake Johnson would know a little something about pickleball. The actor is starring in The Dink, a sort of spiritual heir to Dodgeball – it has a Ben Stiller cameo – and he plays Dusty Boyd, a former tennis pro turned plucky pickleball upstart. Presumably Johnson took the gig because he has a deep love of the sport, a fondness for its pockmarked balls and weirdly smooth paddles? “No experience of it whatsoever,” says the actor, cheerfully, on a video call from Los Angeles.

Yet this underdog of a racket sport, loved by retirees, found him anyway. At the climax of the movie, Dusty must play against an old foe, which meant Johnson had to undertake months of real-life training in pickleball and tennis, so it looked as if he could play. “It was like WWE. They call it fake wrestling. The outcome is there, but you still have to wrestle. That was probably the most stressful part of the film to me.”

The Dink came to Johnson through its writer, Sean Clements, who had taken up the sport. “He started playing pickleball, and then became friends with this group of older women in Beverly Hills. He’s like, they talk so much shit, and get so competitive, it’s just so funny.” At the time, Johnson was searching for a specific kind of comedy. “I was looking to do something really fun and light, with big comedic set pieces. I wanted to make a movie that feels a little old school, there’s no messaging, it’s not trying to teach people anything.” It was just before the 2024 presidential election in the US. “I knew, however that goes, it’s going to get crazy for our country, and it’s going to be very divisive, and the internet is going to get all mad at each other about everything, and we’re all going to be fighting,” he says.

The Dink was born from a desire to escape, if just for a moment. “I thought, if I’m going to make something, I don’t want to throw more wood on to that fire. You could say the world is burning, and you have so much great evidence. But can we just talk about this, for an hour and a half? Because while this is going on, there’s also life.”

There is no denying that culture has taken on a new intensity in recent years. From Marty Supreme to One Battle After Another, movies and television are heightened, brittle and usually immensely stressful to watch. “You go: man, I know everybody is loving this, and it’s winning all the awards, but I can’t watch it. I’m already fucking stressed. Give me a break!”

The Dink is that break. Dusty is “a goober”, according to Johnson. He works at his father’s country club and remains bitter about the injury that ended his promising tennis career, for which he blames Andy Roddick. When Dusty takes up pickleball, he joins a tough-talking, hard-hitting gang of older women, led by Mary Steenburgen’s Candace, who schools Dusty in sport and life. In a particularly lovely strand, Dusty and Candace develop a rock-solid intergenerational friendship. “I don’t agree with this idea that men and women can’t be friends, and that no matter what, it’s going to be screwed up with sex,” he says. “That feels so crazy old school and puritan to me.” Steenburgen is a legend of comedy, and Johnson was already a big fan. “Parenthood meant a ton to me when I first saw it. So did Step Brothers. I feel about her the way that Dusty feels about Candace. I don’t view her as my older friend. Mary’s my friend. I would hang out with Mary whenever.”

Has Johnson seen that other great racket sports movie, the steamy, sweaty, Zendaya-starring Challengers? He has not, he says, but he defers to his co-star Aaron Chen’s response: “Chen refers to our movie as the sexier Challengers.”

Johnson started acting in high school, in Chicago. He had dropped out at 15, unsure of the path his life was going to take, but went back to give it one last shot. “I couldn’t crack the code. I just knew that nothing was working. And then I did a play, and I was like, oh, this is great.” It changed the course of his life. “I got credit for the first time from stuffy adults who did not like me,” he says.

What was there to dislike? “I don’t know. Like, if there was a party at someone’s house and somebody found matches, all the parents assumed I brought the matches,” he says. “And a lot of the time, I had brought the matches.” Acting funnelled that restless energy into something positive. “I didn’t even realise it could be a real job. I didn’t realise that Cheers, which was my favourite show, was just a bunch of working actors who had a job. Once I started doing the math on it, I thought, I’ve got to go all in. That’s everything for me.”

He moved to Los Angeles and spent years as a jobbing actor, taking whatever he could, whenever he could. “I call it grinding,” he recalls. “If a commercial came, I’m taking it. If a co-star [role] comes, I’m taking it.” He appeared in Curb Your Enthusiasm as “Man on Cell Phone”, in Get Him to the Greek as “Jazz Man”. He describes Hollywood as “a really long dinner table with a bunch of seats, and the seats keep getting taken out, and then a new phase will come. You just want to stay at the table. At that point, I was just trying to get to the table.”

Then came New Girl, the smash-hit sitcom that arrived in his life when he was 33. For seven years, he played the romantic lead, Nick, to Zooey Deschanel’s Jess. “New Girl was a very scary job, because all of them were really prepared. I had to stop smoking pot, because I was like, oh, these fools know their lines! I got to make some changes and do it fast, or else I’m going to lose this job,” he laughs.

That job gave him his seat at the table. New Girl was such a smash that after a couple of years, Prince reached out and requested a cameo. He was a huge fan of the show, and would watch it on his tour bus. He appeared in 2014, in a post-Super Bowl episode that was watched by 26.3 million people. On set, Prince referred to Deschanel as Jess, and to Johnson as Nick. “I grew up loving Prince. We would take road trips from Chicago just to listen to his music in Minneapolis. So I thought, I’m going to show this man respect. I’m not going to be weird. And then I heard him say, ‘I’d like to meet Nick now.’ And he was so great.” They talked for hours about sport and TV. “Cheers, Roseanne and New Girl. Those were his three shows.”

When New Girl blew up, Johnson’s life was transformed. “I think it exploded my brain for about six months. I spiralled out, and I didn’t know what it all meant. Bill Murray’s got a great quote that when you first get fame, you’ve got about a year where you can kind of be an asshole, and then if you stay an asshole after that, that just means you’re an asshole.” Johnson took a while to adjust to being recognised when out in the world, but it helped that he was already in his 30s. “Honestly, the dust just settled. I thought, this is the life that I wanted.”

Johnson has been working solidly ever since, with a varied and busy career, ranging from blockbusters including Jurassic World and The Mummy, to the cruelly cancelled adult publishing comedy Minx (“that one makes me sad”) and, more recently, Apple’s sex-cam murder mystery Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. He has also reunited with his old Drinking Buddies and Digging for Fire director Joe Swanberg, for The Sun Never Sets, with Dakota Fanning. When we speak, they have just closed a deal to take it to cinemas, with an expected release date later this year.

Still, he says, there’s nothing like having kids to keep you grounded. In 2014, his wife, the artist Erin Payne, gave birth to their twin daughters. “Kids changed everything. I think if I didn’t have kids, I’d have a ponytail now, and I wouldn’t be wearing a shirt in this interview, because I wouldn’t believe in shirts,” he laughs. “Kids humble you, fast. They are not fans of the old Jakester and his work.”

Not even Spider-Man? (He voiced a version of Spider-Man in two animated films, Into the Spider-Verse and Across the Spider-Verse; a third is in production.) “They thought Hailee [Steinfeld]’s Spider-Gwen was cool. They thought my character was the most embarrassing, because he just ate pizza and was the old chubby one. The vibe was kind of like, why’d you say yes to that?” He had to tell them that’s not exactly how it works. “I was like, I don’t get to say, ‘Can I be the coolest one in there?’”

It sounds as if Johnson has no problem staying humble. “Exactly right,” he says. “Unfortunately!”