Jonah Hauer-King has been crying a lot. “It used to be this thing I really struggled with, both in my personal life and at work,” says the 30-year-old actor, who immortalised The Little Mermaid’s Prince Eric in live-action form two years ago. “But now I cry all the time!” Any specific reason? “Oh, not bad stuff,” he clarifies, smiling. “I think maybe I shut down some feelings and emotions from stuff as a child, and over the years, I’ve just processed them. And then that well of emotion is just there… waiting.”
It’s hard to imagine that the well has simply been sitting tight this entire time. After all, Hauer-King is quickly becoming one of Britain’s most in-demand talents, with three films out this year alone. A well-equipped emotional toolbox is, I suspect, a major asset, particularly for someone with such an eclectic CV. Prince Eric led to his role as a Slovakian Jewish man who falls in love with a fellow prisoner in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Sky’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz. And that led to this year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, a fitful reboot of the Nineties horror franchise, and Netflix’s A House of Dynamite, a highly anticipated political thriller that marks the latest film from the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow. “It was an amazing thing just to be around her,” Hauer-King says of the filmmaker, citing her as one of the top five people in the industry he’d wanted to work with.
Today, though, we’re here to talk about The Threesome, a romantic comedy that also stars the Set It Up actor Zoey Deutch and Bottoms’s Ruby Cruz. The plot is in the title: a 30-year-old sound engineer named Connor, played by Hauer-King, has a threesome with his crush, Olivia (Deutch), and a woman they befriend named Jenny (Cruz). What follows is a set of deeply relatable contraceptive failures (“so after thousands of years of perfection, the pull-out method has finally failed,” teases one character) and a somewhat less relatable double set of pregnancies. As Olivia puts it: “Why’d you have to have the world’s most potent freaking sperm?”
Hauer-King was sceptical when the script landed in his inbox. “I had an immediate ‘judge the book by its cover’ moment and thought, ‘Really? The Threesome? Is that what we’re doing now?’” he laughs. Audience members may well feel similarly. But what could ostensibly be a sensationalised stab at reviving the romcom is actually a moving and nuanced film, complete with astute direction from Chad Hartigan and a surprisingly sharp script: shortly after arriving at an abortion clinic, Olivia muses, “I don’t think I wanna do this. Does this make me a Republican?”
As Connor, Hauer-King brings the necessary warmth and softness to a character who, in lesser hands, could be written off as a tactless f***boy. “He’s a little bit lost and doesn’t have his s*** together, so when things begin to unravel for him, it all just felt very true to life,” says the Camden-born Londoner. “But I think he’s able to admit to his mistakes and is trying to take responsibility for his actions, so I was quite drawn to him because of that.”
Fame isn’t real life. If you’re on that conveyor belt all the time with everything being looked after for you, your brain gets fried
Despite being a devoted romcom fan himself – The Holiday comes up more than once: “It’s probably one of my favourite films, even though I sometimes don’t admit that” – Hauer-King doesn’t see himself as a typical romantic hero. “There are types of films where it’s pure escapism and you’re watching a version of a guy that’s probably completely unattainable and not a real person. But there’s a place for that because it’s fun to watch some beautiful dude get his top off. But in the case of our film, it’s more about characters that people can relate to. Having someone who is f***ing up and making mistakes, I think, is always quite entertaining to watch.”
Hauer-King does actually appear topless in the film – and lest we forget, he played a literal Disney prince – so some could say he falls more into the former category than the latter, though I doubt he’d concur. Speaking to me over Zoom from the north London home he shares with his long-term girlfriend, Hauer-King isn’t quick to give anything away about his off-camera life: behind him, for instance, is nothing but a blank white wall. But it adds to the inconspicuous charm of a man who’s either unaware of his own star power or has quietly chosen to put it to one side.
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He’s also chatty, asking me plenty of questions. The result is that our conversation frequently veers off course as we get sidetracked talking about our favourite pubs, the north versus south divide in London (“you’ll probably end up in north London,” he says when I tell him I’m tiring of south), and the underrated joy of singing and playing the guitar to nobody but yourself. “It sounds a bit sad when you put it like that,” he demurs, easing up when I confess to doing it myself. “Okay, now that you’ve said you do it, I can say I really like it,” he laughs. “It brings me a lot of joy. I find it very calming.” He pauses. “I’m definitely a frustrated musician.”
Hauer-King has kept the music up, though. As a teenager he played in a band called Rova, and he’s also sung in some of his films, including The Threesome – at a pivotal moment he plays a song on the guitar, which wasn’t in the script. “I just had an idea and decided to write a song that was slightly based on something I’d written before,” he explains. “I had no expectations that it would end up in the film.”
Of course, there was also singing in The Little Mermaid. Was he worried about being typecast as a Disney prince after that role? “The honest answer is that when you’re an actor, you’re so terrified of never working again that when I was offered it, my first thought was not, ‘oh no, I’m going to be typecast’ but ‘yes, I’ve got a job for the next 18 months’,” he says. The film grossed more than $500m at the global box office, but was also mired in controversy after its star, the singer and actor Halle Bailey – who Hauer-King calls “a lifelong friend” – faced racist backlash due to her casting as Ariel. “It was crazy to see how she navigated it all with so much poise and grace,” he says, calling Bailey’s response “an unbelievable lesson in focusing on the positive things that playing that role was bringing to people”.
As an Etonian with a first-class degree in Theology and Religious Studies from the University of Cambridge, Hauer-King is often asked about privilege, both his own and that of the litany of British male actors with an almost identical pedigree. Does he ever feel forced to apologise for his gilded upbringing? “I don’t think people should apologise because I don’t think it’s for me to tell anyone who can and can’t be an actor, that’s not the point of the conversation,” he says, thoughtfully. “The point is that there is a completely unbalanced representation of different demographics within the arts, which is not acceptable. But more than that, the work is so much less interesting if it’s all stories being told by one type of person. It probably sounds a bit glib, but if art is meant to be reflective of who we are as people, then how could that be possible if everyone who’s writing or starring in a project went to private school?”
Despite growing up in what might seem like a tangential connection to the celebrity world – Hauer-King’s father, Jeremy, is an esteemed restaurateur who co-owned the company responsible for The Wolseley – the actor is still getting to grips with fame. “It’s an incredibly heightened way of living,” he says, of the press tour circuit and all the pomp and pageantry that comes with releasing a film, from talk shows to events. “But it’s not real life,” he continues. “So I think it’s important to come back down to earth because if you’re on that conveyor belt all the time with everything being looked after for you, your brain gets fried.”
Hanging out with friends who aren’t in the industry helps – “basically none of my friends from school and university are actors,” he says – as does cleaning, which is one of Hauer-King’s favourite pastimes. “My girlfriend’s mum thinks I’m a freak because she buys me different cleaning products and I get excited about it,” he says. Having just wrapped on Anna Biller’s medieval ghost film, The Face of Horror, he’ll also be taking some time off in the run-up to Christmas. Just before it’s time to wrap up, we fawn over the various aspects of life in London during the festive season: mulled wine, mince pies, and cosy evenings in the pub. He smiles: “It’s a bit like The Holiday.”
‘The Threesome’ is streaming exclusively on Prime Video, and distributed by Signature Entertainment
