Theres a Cliff? Lets F***ing Jump! Seven A-List Actors From Dwayne Johnson to Michael B. Jordan Talk Breaking In, Crying on Cue and Weaponizing Rejection

The seven men who gathered for THR‘s Oscar season Actors Roundtable — Frankenstein’s Jacob Elordi, The Life of Chuck’s Mark Hamill, The Smashing Machine’s Dwayne Johnson, Sinners’ Michael B. Jordan, The Secret Agent’s Wagner Moura, Jay Kelly’s Adam Sandler and Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’s Jeremy Allen White — don’t share very much in common.

Five are American (Hamill, Johnson, Jordan, Sandler and White), one is Australian (Elordi) and one is Brazilian (Moura). Their ages span from 20s (Elordi, 28) to 70s (Hamill, 74). Some shot to fame on TV (Elordi on Euphoria, Jordan on The Wire, Moura on Narcos, Sandler on Saturday Night Live and White on Shameless), another in movies (Hamill via a little film called Star Wars) and still another in, of all things, wrestling (Johnson).

But as they sat down together at The Sun Rose West Hollywood in mid-November amid a wave of mutual admiration — “I’ve always wanted to meet you,” gushed Johnson, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, to Hamill, whom he first “encountered” decades ago as Luke Skywalker — they all shared two things: (1) Each gave a career-best performance in a 2025 film, and (2) None has ever received so much as an Oscar nomination. For at least some of them, the latter will soon change.

Dwayne, nobody before you had made the jump from pro wrestling to A-list movie stardom. Was a pivot to acting always planned?

DWAYNE JOHNSON I think it was planned by something more powerful than me, but also, I wanted to grow and to challenge myself, and transitioning into Hollywood was something that I definitely wanted. With my first movie, The Mummy Returns, we were shooting in the Sahara Desert, and I was so sick — I went over there and probably ate something that I shouldn’t have —and it was 110 degrees, but I was freezing and wearing a blanket. Stephen Sommers, the director, comes over, “You okay?” I’m like, “Yeah!” I’d never acted before. He calls “Action!” We have our scene. And when he said, “Cut!” I went, “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

Michael, when you were 19 years old, you came out to L.A. to try to break into movies, but there wasn’t any interest from the agencies. How did you get past that?

MICHAEL B. JORDAN At that age, you take rejection personally — I did, anyway, and used it as a healthy chip on my shoulder to motivate myself to continue to work hard and stay locked in. But also, it fortified this belief that, “What’s for me is for me,” you know? I didn’t know exactly where I was going to end up, but I was on the right path.

Mark, how did you wind up in L.A. at 17?

MARK HAMILL My dad was in the Navy, so we were constantly moving — I went to nine schools in 12 years — and the last place we got transferred to was Yokohama, Japan. I graduated from Yo High and then came to Hollywood. I’d known for as long as I can remember, “That’s the business I want to be in.” I’d seen the black-and-white King Kong, and I didn’t know how they made dinosaurs come to life, but I wanted to be in the business where you make dinosaurs come to life. I figured early on, “If it turns out that I’m not a good actor, I can cater. I don’t have to be in the show. I want to be near the show.” But I was very lucky. By the end of the year I got here, I had an agent.

Adam, you started doing stand-up while you were a student at NYU.

ADAM SANDLER I did stand-up and then got on SNL, and I wanted to do what Eddie Murphy did, and started doing movies too. In the back of my head, I was like, “It’d be fun to do a serious movie someday” — my grandma used to say, “You’re the next James Caan!” And then Paul [Thomas Anderson] wrote Punch-Drunk Love for me and kind of invited me into this world.

Wagner, you were very successful in Brazil before becoming internationally known via Narcos.

WAGNER MOURA Narcos was a big thing — everywhere I’d go in the world, people would go, “Pablo Escobar!” But I never wanted to come here and “try Hollywood.” What makes me different and maybe special for films is the fact that I’m not from here. I never understood actors who would try to lose their accents. I’ll never be like, say, Jeremy — I’m a Brazilian actor and I represent a bunch of people who live here in this country and speak with accents. But when I started coming here, people would ask, “Would you be able to play this character with a standard American accent?” And I was like, “No.” First because I’m not able to (laughs), but second because I thought that’s kind of wrong. I’m a Brazilian actor.

Jeremy, you were going to be a dancer.

JEREMY ALLEN WHITE I transferred into a middle school that specialized in performing arts and joined the dance program there, but I didn’t think the teacher was taking dance seriously enough, so I joined the drama program. There was a wonderful teacher there, John McEnany, and he took things very seriously. I liked that as a 12-year-old — it felt fun to commit myself to something in such a serious way. I then went to a performing arts high school. I thought my life was going to be in New York doing theater and a Law & Order every once in a while to pay the rent. But I got really lucky. I auditioned for this show [Shameless] with Bill Macy for Showtime, a John Wells show, and moved to L.A. when I was 18, right out of high school, and had this 11-year training camp with great actors and great writing.

We have a sports injury to thank for Jacob being here.

JACOB ELORDI I did Seussical, the musical,when I was 13, as a way to deal with rambunctious behavior —they put me into this thing — and then I realized acting was a way you could find some kind of peace. Where I grew up in Australia, you weren’t really a person unless you played sports, so I did that and enjoyed it enough. But then I broke my back when I was 16 — we were lifting weights too early — and I remember laying on the floor and kind of laughing because I’d been doing rehearsals for a play at school at the same time, and the rugby coach and I had just had a conversation about me needing to choose one or the other. I was kind of like Troy Bolton in High School Musical. (Laughs.)

Wagner, 20 years after meeting someone at the Cannes Film Festival, that same person wrote for you and directed you in the part of a lifetime.

MOURA I met Kleber Mendonça Filho in Cannes when I was there with Lower City, a Brazilian film, and he was there as a critic. We hit it off, and then I went back to Brazil and saw that he was directing short films, and those were great. Then in 2012, I saw his feature Neighboring Sounds and said, “This is one of the greatest Brazilian films ever! I have to work with this guy!” But it took a long time. What really brought us together was politics. Brazil from 2018 to 2022 was in a very bad moment, and whoever was vocal against what was going on suffered consequences. We both were. I myself directed a film about a guy who was the leader of the armed struggle in Brazil, a film called Marighella, which premiered in Berlin in 2019, but was censored in Brazil. And Kleber faced that too. We got together and were like, “How can we react to what’s going on here?” And then The Secret Agent [which is set in the ’70s but speaks to recent Brazilian history, too] happened.

Jacob, you were off playing a POW in the limited series The Narrow Road to the Deep North when Andrew Garfield dropped out of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein just nine weeks before it was to shoot.

ELORDI I was in the middle of shooting these death camp sequences when I heard about it, but when Guillermo sends you something, you need to respond immediately. I read it and talked to Guillermo, and then there were six excruciating days when I had to keep shooting and didn’t hear back from him. I like what Michael said about, “What’s yours is yours and what’s not is not.” But this was the first time that after reading a screenplay, I was like, “No, this has to be mine.”

Dwayne, you were the highest-grossing actor in the world in 2013, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2024. You’re the fifth-highest-grossing actor of all time. The 40 films in which you’ve starred have collectively taken in slightly less than $14 billion worldwide, or an average of $349.7 million. And within the past year, you had two movies open at No. 1 at the box office in the same month, something no other actor or actress had achieved in 27 years. But for a number of years, you’ve felt frustrated with your career.

JOHNSON (Sheepishly) Lunch is on me, boys. (Laughs.) I’ve had a lucky career. But I reached a point seven or eight years ago where I had this little voice behind my rib cage. I think we all have it — sometimes it whispers to us, and sometimes it’s really resounding — and that voice for me was asking, “What’s more?” I’m obsessed with the idea of trying. Yes, “What’s yours is yours, what’s not yours is not yours,” but also, I believe in setting an intention and taking a step toward the thing that you want because the universe has this way of meeting you halfway.

JORDAN Correct.

JOHNSON The big movies are fun to do. They’re hard work, and when they hit, it’s great — a lot of people around the world like ’em. But I had this obsession to do something for me. I started asking myself, “Am I living my dream, or mine plus a lot of other people’s and entities’ around me?” I met Mark Kerr in the late ’90s as he was becoming “the Smashing Machine,” and I saw his [2002] documentary [of the same name] and thought it was really moving. Here was this guy who looked invincible, and in many ways was, but at the same time he was broken inside. I let that be my guiding light creatively, and it allowed me to tap into an artistry I was looking for — to challenge myself: “Oh, there’s the cliff? We don’t know what’s on the other side? Let’s fucking jump!”

Jeremy, Bruce Springsteen had never cooperated with a narrative film about his life before he authorized Scott Cooper to make one, and they both wanted you to star. Take us into how you processed that.

WHITE There are some actors who feel like they can do anything, that they can show up and figure it out. I wanted to make sure I was the right guy. The odds seemed stacked against me. I mean, Scott wanted me to do all the singing in it, but I’d never sung before. He wanted me to play the guitar for it, but I’d never played the guitar before. And we had just six months to prepare. I was like, “I don’t know if that can be done.” So I took a couple of days. But then it was that thing of, “Am I going to shy away from this challenge or am I going to jump and see what happens?” It was a leap of faith.

JOHNSON Jeremy, did you feel — because I felt this on The Smashing Machine — added pressure inhabiting the skin of one of the greatest ever?

WHITE For sure. One of the greatest ever, and also, people have their own understanding of Bruce Springsteen, and I felt like, “I don’t want to interrupt that understanding.” It’s so pure and powerful, and he’s adored, and I just didn’t want to mess with it.

JORDAN Did you find it helpful that you had the resource directly at your disposal, to kind of pull from him?

WHITE In the beginning, I spent a lot of time with Bruce — he was very gracious and generous with his time. But then he was on set almost every day, which was something that we did not speak about prior. And I was just like, “Oh, nooo.” (Laughs.)

ELORDI I saw pictures of that and felt for you.

HAMILL I get vicarious flop sweat just thinking about it.

ELORDI Did you ever feel like you could have an argument with him and say, “I don’t think he would do it that way?” (Laughs.)

For three of you, your 2025 films were reunions with filmmakers you’d worked with before. Michael, you’ve starred in every one of Ryan Coogler’s features going back to Fruitvale Station and through the Creed and Black Panther films. I assume that reteaming brings an added level of comfort?

JORDAN There’s definitely a shorthand that you develop that is extremely important. But also, Sinners is the first movie I’ve done since directing for the first time [2023’s Creed III], so I had a new set of eyes on set, trying to spot ways that I could be helpful to Ryan. And he’s helpful to me — he knows me very well and knew that this one was outside of my comfort zone but thought it was a challenge that I needed and knew that I was looking for a challenge. The fact that he wanted me to play twins …

JOHNSON That’s a crazy cliff, man. You were so good, brother.

JORDAN Thank you, man. That comfortability between me and Ryan — being able to talk through things and push each other — brought the best out of me.

Mark, ever since the first Star Wars trilogy, you’ve gravitated toward things that allowed you to show other sides of yourself, including collaborating with Mike Flanagan on the 2023 limited series The Fall of the House of Usher and now this film.

HAMILL When you do something well in Hollywood, they want you to do that over and over again because it’s a proven entity. I went to Broadway because I knew that there were open auditions. It wasn’t like they were saying, “Please come here and do theater!” When I got into voiceover, I thought, “Where has this been all my life?” Because they cast with their ears, not their eyes, and you’re able to play parts you’d never get in a million years if you were on camera. And I got really spoiled — I got to the point where I thought, “I don’t care if I ever do on-camera again.” But I was a fan of Mike’s before he contacted me for The Fall of the House of Usher — he has these wonderful ensembles, and I love ensembles because the weight of the picture’s not on your shoulders — and we just clicked. The second time he called me, he said, “I have something you might be interested in that’s based on a Stephen King novella.” Based on Mike’s reputation and Stephen King’s, I was expecting the supernatural epic of all time, but The Life of Chuck is a life-affirming portrait of a young man at four different stages of his life. I was knocked out by it. If it weren’t for Mike, I think I’d still just be doing voiceover because the older you get, the less you care — this is something you all have to look forward to! (Laughs.) I shouldn’t put it that way. You do care, but you don’t sweat the small stuff.

Adam, Noah Baumbach said he wrote the part of movie star Jay Kelly’s sweet manager for you because the character reminds him of you.

SANDLER I became very friendly with Noah after The Meyerowitz Stories. I love him. He’s funny as hell, a meticulous director, very thoughtful, wants you to get it right, gives you time to get it right — he’s not moving on until everyone’s happy. He’s a great man. Then he told me he was writing another movie for me, out of nowhere. He for some reason thinks I’m a wonderful guy. I’m like, “I’ll take it, man. I can be a good guy.” He doesn’t see the sickness — or he chooses to ignore it! (Laughs.)

JOHNSON It’s a beautiful performance.

HAMILL And really the heart and soul of the film because the toll Jay Kelly takes on your character is tragic, he just takes you for granted. It made me think, “Have I treated my people the way they should be treated?”

ELORDI I watched it with my manager. We were both crying.

Adam, you’ve said that with Hustle and Jay Kelly, part of the draw for you was getting to play a character who cares so much about someone else.

SANDLER It feels good to be on the set and be that person. And then, even when you go home at night, you’re going, “I’ve got to be a little bit more like that.”

JOHNSON That’s the beauty, I think, of what we do. It forces us to look at ourselves.

Several people here spent a significant amount of time in a makeup trailer for their 2025 film. I’d love to hear how it shaped your performance.

ELORDI It gave me the freedom to be completely expressive. There were things that I could do in that makeup that I’d never get away with in a regular film. When I spoke to Guillermo the first time, he said, “This isn’t a prosthetics process. It’s going to be the sacrament. It needs to be holy. It’s, ‘The Father, Son and Holy Spirit,’ and then you step into the church. The time that it takes is what you need to become this thing that’s other.” When the Creature is newborn, from head to toe was about 10 hours. When he has clothes on, it was five hours. If you could have 10 hours every day to get ready for the day, it would be the greatest blessing. You learn the screenplay inside out, and then you can put it down and spend another three hours thinking about it, and then not thinking about it. And then all of a sudden, you look up in the mirror and you are gone.

JOHNSON I didn’t have five or 10 hours. We were four hours every day in the makeup chair …

HAMILL Only four hours! (Laughs.)

JOHNSON But to Jacob’s point, it does allow for this absorption of the role, of the screenplay, of what’s happening. I’d look up every 30 minutes and something would be different. And by the time I walked out of the trailer, I was Mark Kerr. The first day I walked on set, the air changed. You felt it. There was a version of Mark Kerr that could have required six or seven hours, a complete transformation. I was prepared to go that route. Benny [Safdie, the director] said, “Do you feel like you’ll discover something about yourself playing this role?” I said, “We haven’t even shot a frame of film yet, and I feel like I’ve already discovered a lot about myself.” And he goes, “If that’s the case, I’m going to make sure I can see your eyes and still see Dwayne in there somewhere. When you discover stuff about yourself, I want to feel it.”

ELORDI The soul of the character is there, but I see yours as well, which is the fucking greatest part about it.

MOURA Because you’re not Mark Kerr. It’s the way you see him. That was very well thought out. You have to be there too.

When on your 2025 film did you feel most in danger of failing?

WHITE Every day. I don’t think I ever feel totally certain on any job, but for this one, I never felt as if I was on real firm ground.

SANDLER When you see in the script that your character is crying out of control, you go, “Fuck, man.” I don’t get excited for those. In real life, I think I’ve cried once — I’m just not a guy who cries a lot. But there were like three or four of those in this movie. The week before I’d go, “Fucking Wednesday’s going to suck. I’m going to let everybody down. How the fuck am I going to cry?”

ELORDI The final scene of Frankenstein is meant to be full, operatic emotion, forgiving the father. I thought we’d shoot it at the end. But much earlier than that, Guillermo said, “Tomorrow we’re going to do the forgiveness scene. The set is ready.” This was going to be the first time I’d acted with Oscar [Isaac, who plays the Creature’s creator]. I hadn’t figured out how to emote as this thing. And I didn’t know what the voice was yet.

HAMILL No pressure! (Laughs.)

ELORDI I was like, “If I think about this, I’m not going to go to work tomorrow; I’m going to be in the hospital or something. I’m going to freak out.” So I just didn’t think about it, and then I just did it. If I’d obsessed over it for the next eight weeks, it would have been a nightmare.

MOURA Sometimes I feel like we don’t need the amount of preparation that we all think we need.

WHITE It’s just to make us feel better.

MOURA Sometimes, just show up and do it!

ELORDI I think it’s because it’s an intangible thing, whatever it is that we do, so you have to pretend that there is a business structure to it. Like, “I did this from nine to three, so I must be good to go.”

Which of your lines is most often quoted back to you?

WHITE “Yes, Chef.”

SANDLER I hear “Jackass” a lot. I forget it’s from Happy Gilmore, so people scream “Jackass” at me, and I’m like, “What the fuck?!”

JOHNSON It would have to be “You’re Welcome” [the song he sings in Moana].

MOURA “Plata o plomo?” [A Spanish line from Narcos that translates to “Silver or lead?”]

ELORDI I don’t know if I’ve ever had a line quoted back to me.

JOHNSON I predict it will be, “I will make you bleed” [from Frankenstein].

HAMILL Mine is, “May the Schwartz be with you.” Thanks, Mel Brooks! (Laughs.)

An abbreviated version of this story appeared in the Jan. 2 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.