Joseph Gordon-Levitt: ‘People got 500 Days of Summer wrong’

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is intense. Aged 14, he told a room full of journalists at a press conference: “To me, this is all pornography” – “this” being celebrity, showbiz, the media, self-promotion. Aged 17, he told his agent he didn’t want to be in 10 Things I Hate About You because he wanted to make arthouse films not high-school rom-coms. When he did reluctantly accept the role of nerdy, lovesick Cameron, he insisted on meeting with the director to tell him which bits of the script he thought were too cheesy (his notes were politely ignored).

In his early twenties, more embarrassed than proud of the huge success of both 10 Things I Hate About You and his stint on TV show 3rd Rock from the Sun, Gordon-Levitt pivoted to the kinds of high-brow, low-budget films he’d always dreamed of making. In 2001, he played a teenage psychiatric patient with rage issues in Manic, about which the film critic Roger Ebert observed (correctly) that Gordon-Levitt “shows promise as a serious actor”. In 2003, he played a Mormon missionary in Latter Days, then a teen sex worker who’d been abused by his Little League coach in Mysterious Skin (2005) and a brain-injured janitor in The Lookout (2007). With his crinkled, inconspicuous good looks and hangdog charm, his is a quality that can shift between everyman, boy next door and misfit – he can make dark characters loveable, and the loveable ones a little darker.

As his star gently rose, Gordon-Levitt consistently rejected what he called “the fascist cult of celebrity”. His Lookout co-star Jeff Daniels observed that “of the actors I’ve worked with under 30, Joe was the least interested in anything other than what happened between ‘action’ and ‘cut’. He had no entourage, and I never saw him on a cell discussing his career with a publicist.”

Left to Right: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Heath Ledger, Julia Stiles and Larisa Olenyk in ’10 Things I Hate About You’

It’s no wonder, then, that in 2008 when director Marc Webb was looking for someone to star in his new film, a whimsical meta rom-com called 500 Days of Summer, he worried that Gordon-Levitt was too intense for it. “Whimsy” was not exactly something he was known for.

So, I put it to Gordon-Levitt now, is he an intense person? “Yeah, I mean, a lot of the time,” the 43-year-old tells me, smiling that dimpled, slightly impenetrable smile. “I like to relax too, but you know, you only get to be alive once. Might as well go hard.”

We’re talking over a rigorously controlled video call, Gordon-Levitt sitting in front of a giant poster for his very fun new film Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. It’s not, I suspect, a set-up he particularly enjoys, preferring as he does to talk about Nabokov novels and “the deterioration of free society as we know it” than to offer amusing little anecdotes about helicopter stunts.

As for that intensity, in the end, the 500 Days of Summer director changed his mind – “The intensity, I think, is just thoughtfulness,” he told New York Magazine. And besides, that youthful self-seriousness actually made him perfect casting for the film, which became a sleeper hit then a cult classic. Gordon-Levitt plays Tom, a hopeless romantic who has his heart broken by the girl of his dreams (Zooey Deschanel’s Summer). Or maybe he’s a narcissist with misogynistic tendencies who projects his own fantasies onto women he barely knows. The film’s genius is it allows both of those options to feel plausible – though you might be surprised to know that Gordon-Levitt favours the latter interpretation.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel in ‘500 Days of Summer’ (Photo: Press)

“People say negative things about Zooey’s character,” he says. “It gets interpreted that it’s a story about this innocent guy who’s so nice and loves his girlfriend so much, and then she breaks up with him, and how could she do that? But what you really ought to pay attention to is that my character was not listening. He ignores a lot of what Summer says.”

He brings up a scene halfway through the film, when Summer starts to tell Tom about a recurring dream she has. “And the narrator just starts talking over her,” he says with a tone of indignance. “This is a great cinematic representation of a selfish young man who’s not even listening to his girlfriend. He’s thinking all about himself. It’s no wonder she broke up with him.”

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It’s a classic example of an unreliable narrator. “I’m being a bit film nerdy here, or literary nerdy, but I love stories that are told with an unreliable narrator, because then it’s incumbent upon you as the viewer to decide what you think is true. And that is a very good instinct not just for reading books or watching movies, but for everything in life. Especially” – here he unexpectedly raises his voice – “if you’re reading the NEWS, you have to pay attention to: who’s the source of this news? Where are they coming from? What is their bias?”

There isn’t time for Gordon-Levitt to elaborate here, though he’s made no secret of his left-wing politics in the past. It’s in his blood. His grandfather Michael Gordon was a film director who was blacklisted as a communist in the McCarthy era. Growing up in California’s San Fernando Valley, he would read his dad Dennis’s anarchist literature. “My dad never blew anything up,” he once said, “but he probably had friends who did.” His mum Jane ran for Congress as a member of the left-wing Peace and Freedom Party.

Gordon-Levitt himself, meanwhile, has made a self-funded documentary about the Occupy movement, gone on climate marches, described Donald Trump as a “clear despot”, and spoken out in support of Black Lives Matter and the principle of defunding the police. He once said that in many instances, “it would make more sense for a social worker to show up instead of a guy with a gun”.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Detective Bobby Abbott and Eddie Murphy as Axel Foley in ‘Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F’ (Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon)

Funnily enough, there is a line in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F that echoes that almost word for word. “People don’t want swashbucklers anymore – they want social workers,” curmudgeonly police officer Jeffrey tells Eddie Murphy’s maverick cop Axel Foley, somewhat bitterly.

This is the fourth film in the Beverly Hills Cop franchise, and the first in 30 years. In the first film – which became a surprise box office phenomenon in 1984 and made a star out of Murphy – Axel Foley sets out to avenge the murder of his best friend. Two underwhelming sequels followed, but this new one is zippy and smart and finds Axel in his sixties but resolutely undimmed.

We soon meet Axel’s estranged daughter (Taylour Paige), who became a defence attorney seemingly to spite her father, and is now in danger after getting mixed up in the dealings of a corrupt police captain (Kevin Bacon) hell bent on covering up his involvement with a drug cartel. Gordon-Levitt is Detective Bobby Abbott, a formerly rule-following young(er) police officer who ends up joining Axel in rooting out the bad guys.

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This is Gordon Levitt’s third time playing a cop– he played a Gotham City detective in The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and a bullet-proof (literally) New Orleans detective in the sci-fi action film Project Power (2020). But I wonder, given how conversations around the police have changed since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, whether it means something different to play one now. Especially in a film with a substantial body count. Is that something they discussed while making the film? As I talk, he seems repeatedly distracted by someone behind the camera. Then there’s a pause. “I think everything you said is right on,” he says with the tonal equivalent of a full stop. Fair enough.

Eddie Murphy, Taylour Paige, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bronson Pinchot in ‘Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (Photo: Netflix via AP)

Anyway, there’s a personal reason Gordon-Levitt wanted to be in Beverly Hills Cop. “I remember watching this movie when I was much too young because my older brother Dan was an enormous Eddie Murphy fan. And when you have an older sibling, the stuff they like takes on a certain mystique. It’s a little bit forbidden and maybe slightly over your head but so ultra cool. And that was Eddie Murphy and Beverly Hills Cop to me.” Dan died in 2010 from a drug-related accident. This film was a chance to connect with him again.

Gordon-Levitt was close to his brother – they founded HitRecord together, a “little corner of the internet” where creators can produce films and music and poetry and anything else artistic, and remix each other’s work too: “art for art’s sake”, as Gordon-Levitt puts it. But he hasn’t talked much about the loss. Nor does he talk much about his family in general – not his wife, the tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, nor their two sons, whose names he hasn’t disclosed. All of which is unsurprising given his distaste for fame. And yet, like it or not, he has been famous for three decades now. So how has celebrity changed in that time?

“One of the big changes that’s happened is obviously the rise of social media,” he begins. “Social media has a lot of real upsides. But it has made our culture even more obsessed with fame and popularity than it used to be. It’s just a recipe for unhappiness if you’re constantly thinking: ‘How popular am I? How many people like me?’”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: ‘Social media is poisonous, addictive technology’ (Photo: The Tyler Twins/Netflix)

Is he able to resist that? “I have mixed results. I will sometimes open one of those apps, and all of a sudden, there went my evening, and I come away from it feeling empty and scattered and nervous and unsatisfied, and telling myself I’m not going to do that again. But lo and behold, I do do it again. Sometimes. I also have got better. As I’ve learned more about it, I’ve been more able to make sure that I put my phone away, I pay attention to the other people in the room, but it’s hard, and even me, who’s got all the advantages in the world, I still am not always able to resist it. It’s very difficult.”

He takes a breath. “And by the way, these platforms are designed to addict you so that they can feed you more content and generate more ad revenue. There’s literally billions and billions of dollars of the most accomplished technical minds in the world right now that have designed this technology to exploit your human weaknesses and get you hooked on this feeling.” He leans forward in his chair. “It’s no wonder that we’re seeing a mental health crisis, especially in younger people. And these companies that are perpetuating this poisonous, addictive technology, they can’t stop because they’re making too much money, and so it’s really actually an incumbent on…”

He stops himself. Takes another breath. “Well, let me actually – I’ll say two things. I don’t think it’s fair to expect any individual person to be able to resist the most powerful, most expensively built technology ever in the history of the world. It’s too much for one individual to resist. It’s incumbent on lawmakers, and for those of us who are lucky enough to live in democracies, for us to push our lawmakers to make rules about this addictive technology that’s causing so much unhappiness and anxiety, not to mention the deterioration of free society as we know it.”

Intense? Sure. But you might as well go hard.

‘Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F’ is on Netflix now