Which Jake Lacy are you familiar with? Nice Guy Jake Lacy? Total D-Bag Jake Lacy? The actor has made a career out of playing both the nicest and most gag-inducing guy you know across stints in The Office, Girls, High Fidelity, and All Her Fault. In 2016 romcom How to Be Single, he’s been clipped to no end shouting “Did I just win the lottery? Yes, I want to stay home and take care of a baby!” at Leslie Mann’s high-powered doctor. By 2021, he had moved on to belittling Alexandra Daddario and hotel staff as an entitled, richy-rich husband and hotel guest in The White Lotus.
Recently, Lacy has been contemplating what a middle ground might look like for him—the average Joe between doormat and intervention-worthy asshole. He found one such man in this year’s A Mosquito in the Ear, about a couple navigating the adoption of a young daughter in India. Lacy executive produced the project, now available to rent on Prime and Apple TV.
But he could hardly be sent off into the realm of normalcy without one last hurrah as Emmy Rossum’s abusive ex on Furious. Rossum stars in the project as an FBI agent chasing a woman intent on killing the men who trafficked her as a teenager. Lacy, a local cop, flits between his extremes with ease, bashfully begging for forgiveness before slamming his fists against Rossum’s car. Tensions came to a head just prior to the season finale, out next Monday, with Rossum straddling Lacy, upending a bottle of whiskey over his head before he drunkenly sets out after her across town.
When we speak, Lacy is enthusiastic about both the opportunity to work opposite Rossum and be semi-drowned by her under supervision of a stunt coordinator. As for what comes next, he’s buzzing about that too.
What drew you to Furious? What got you excited about it?
Emmy and Scoot [Mcnairy] were already attached, and obviously Liz [Meriwether, the show’s creator]. I’ve loved all their work. I live in Connecticut now, after years in Brooklyn, so any opportunity to work in the city is a treat.
It sounds like you’re not settled into the pace of Connecticut life.
It’s been a slow transition. I grew up in Vermont, so it was a real transition to move to the city. Then I was there for 15 years, and it’s been a slow transition back to this life.
I am really influenced by where I am. I go into the city for work and I’m around creative people doing interesting things and, all of a sudden I’m like, Why are we not living here? This is me. This is who I’m meant to be. Then I go to Nantucket for a week with my family and I’m like, Forget it. I’m wearing flip flops and Vineyard Vines and I don’t care. I’m about to do a movie in Montana and I’m sure by the time I leave there, I’ll be a mountain guy.
Are you a fan of the investigative show? Is this the first project in the genre you’ve done?
It’s the first time I’ve been on the law enforcement side of a thriller drama. What I really like about this show, and really any story, is the human frailty within a familiar genre or circumstance or system. Something like Veep is really fun because it’s this “known” entity, the government. Then you see ego, need, helplessness, revenge, pettiness, and hope, which are all really human things infused into that reality. The same with Furious.
Rob Yang plays a top FBI guy who’s always trying to edge his way upward. He’s experienced, but is also such a fucking loser. That cracks me up so much. There’s a scene where we’re about to go to a shelter to try to find a woman that we think is the person we’re looking for. They have Rob, too loud, go, “Let me get a fizzy water!” Then he comes back and burps as he moves through the doors. It’s such a funny bit.
There’s procedurals, and that’s cool. If they wanted to pay me a bunch of money, I’d be happy to do one. But it’s not that interesting to me. It’s not the actor’s fault; it’s just that framework isn’t set up to let you explore characters in that same way. It’s set up to have a crime, solve that crime, do it again.
You’re by definition doing the same thing over and over and over again.
That’s the purpose of it really. There’s a comfort obviously through getting, as a viewer, to process that a bad thing happened, and then good people took care of it. I get it. I watched [Law & Order] SVU for many years. Religiously. Really needed that little narrative security blanket.
What was it like working opposite Emmy, and being waterboarded with whiskey by her?
Emmy’s awesome, both as a colleague and a leader on set, and then also obviously as an actor. She has such a beat on that character and on the show, and feels really ego-free. When you’re working, you want to be considerate of one another, particularly when you’re doing scenes that are physical or have a sexual element to them. But she’s like, “I trust you. Do whatever.” Which is my vibe as well. We know what the scene is and I trust you as a person. It’s very freeing to have a scene partner who creates that kind of environment or wants to work in that kind of environment.
Waterboarding was awesome. I love any stunt stuff where you can get as close to the thing really happening [as possible]. It’s fun for an actor. We figured out how long I could go for and how to close off your throat to be sputtering, but not actually choking. We did some dry runs of it—well, that’s misleading—we did some practicing with the bottle and there were a couple times where the coordinator was like, “Stop. Are you good?” I was like, “This is great.”
You were like, “I’m acting.”
“I’m pretending! It’s not real!”
You and Emmy are both TV veterans at this point.
That’s so wild to hear.
Is there a project or a character that you were the most surprised by the response to?
I was on the last year of The Office, and in a single episode Ed Helms erroneously claims that my nickname is Plop. For the last 15 years, people are like, “Plop!,” on the street or online. That was a small role in one season. That’s one line in one episode. I would not have thought that would have stuck around for so long.
I don’t know if I was surprised at people’s disdain for my character on The White Lotus, but you feel pretty good about something and you hope for the best. It’s not like any of us were working on that show being like, “This will become a long running series and garner awards left and right, and Mike White will become a household name.” We just thought, This is really cool to make.
Even just in the projects that we’re naming, either you are playing incredibly sweet, lovely men, or horrible, get-away-from-that-guy men. Do you feel like you’re ricocheting back and forth?
It’s so funny, the first 10 years that I was getting to work, it was primarily good boyfriends and things like that. The last eight years has been quite the opposite, don’t-be-alone-with-that-person type of roles. I got what I asked for to be honest, because after a decade of feeling like my job was to take a two-dimensional Nice Guy and try to flesh that out into a real person, I was like, I can do more than this. I thought I was going to leave drama school and go join Oregon Shakespeare and do that for my life. Then I got to do this show I’m Dying Up Here that nobody watched, a really lovely movie called Diane, and then a show A Friend of the Family; all very different characters but a lot more darkness. After The White Lotus, people were like, Oh, you’re a douchebag, got it. That opened that up.
I’m trying to move back to the middle a little. That first decade I was completing female arcs by being a romantic partner, or the guy that the audience is like, Be with him, not the jerk! Then the last number of years has been often completing female arcs by being like, Get away from him! In each instance it’s fulfilling a role within the narrative for someone else’s story.
I like the idea that, for the past 20 years, you’ve been our great feminist actor. You’re supporting all of these women.
[Laughs] It feels the most misogynistic to announce that you are the great feminist actor of the last 20 years. “I don’t know if you know this about me…”
But some have said…
Yes, a source close to Jake said.
I also want to ask you about A Mosquito in the Ear, which is the opposite end of Furious. How did you come upon that project?
Emily [Dillard, the writer] and Nicola [Rinciari, the director], a wonderful husband and wife creative team, sent [the script] to my manager. I really loved it. The story is [about] an American couple who’s going to India to meet and adopt their daughter. They’ve been going through this process for seven years leading up to this trip, and when they arrive, whatever expectations they had were wrong, including the idea that they were scooping up their daughter and saving her from poverty. She is living a very fulfilling life with people who love her, friends, access to education, art, and games. The issue is that she’ll age out of the system, and so they’re having to wrangle with the fact that they’re going to really cause some pain here, in the hope of giving this girl opportunities and a life that she wouldn’t have if she stays in India.
I wanted to speak with Nico cause I wanted to make sure that this wasn’t a white savior story. I didn’t want to be a part of that. On the page, Andrew, my character, can come across as a little distant or a little like the bumbling husband. I wasn’t particularly interested in doing that either. Then we got on the phone and—I love this kid so much—he’s just a wonderful guy and we were fully on the same page. He was like, “This is absolutely not a white savior story. It’s about three people navigating how to become a family and what it really means to give over and trust someone.” We don’t really see the completion of that. You just see the door crack open enough that the potential for this love between the three of them could exist.
We shot in Goa for a month. It was incredible. Afterward, I came on as a producer because I love this movie so much. “What if I kicked in some of my own money, can we figure that out? Would that help the production?” They’re like, “Yeah, this is an indie. We need every dollar we can get.” It’s the first time that I’ve done that: put my money where my mouth is. I care about independent filmmaking and young filmmakers; what can I do to support that? I’m so proud of that movie.
Does it feel like the middle ground that you were talking about? And did it inspire you to do a little bit more producing?
Emily is an incredible producer and I’m a guy who had a check wired from my accountant to their accountant. I don’t want to be claiming to have worn any hat that I didn’t wear. Emily took this thing from a graphic novel that’s based on this real family’s experience in Italy. Then translated it into English and took that and cold called producers and financiers to get a movie made, which is insane to pull that off. I would love to produce more, but I would hate to take credit here where it was not due.
It is more of a middle ground because, first of all, I’m not hitting anyone, and I’m also not a knight in shining armor. I’m just a guy doing his best. I looked up to Philip Seymour Hoffman, Sam Rockwell, Matt Damon, and [George] Clooney—so many of the roles they’re playing, whether it’s The Talented Mr. Ripley or Moon, they’re people who are doing their best in a tight spot. They might be flailing a bit. They might do something that, as an audience, you can sit in judgment of. But they’re just doing their best in a rough circumstance, and that is always the thing I like.
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