Jack Quaid can guess what people must think of him: Entitled. Overconfident. A jerk, no doubt about it.
“Who I am comes with a certain expectation,” he said over breakfast — black coffee, fruit plates — on a Thursday in late January.
Quaid, 32, is the son of the actors Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. (That DNA is strong. You can see his father when he smiles, his mother when he squints.) He grew up in Santa Monica, Calif., grabbing snacks from the craft services table on his parents’ sets and attending a private school with a common room where he could screen his camcorder movies. (An early magnum opus: “Bicycle Cops.”) Which is all to say that Quaid grew up with privilege, and he knows what privilege, unexamined and unacknowledged, can do to a person. He can turn that arrogance on for auditions, which explains why his first role was as a villain in “The Hunger Games” and why he can now be seen as a very bad boyfriend in the thriller “Companion” (in theaters).
But the real Quaid is earnestly, acutely, even painfully aware of his privilege. In rooms where people don’t know him, he finds himself, he said, “apologizing for existing.” He isn’t jealous of his parents. (Please, he has been to therapy.) He loves his parents. He loves the life they have given him. “But there’s definitely a need to prove myself,” he said. “There is a little bit of something with identity and thinking, do I have any value outside of them?” As he said this, the divot in his forehead, which deepens when he’s stressed or concerned, had become a crevasse. “Not to say I’m complaining,” he added.
Over the last several years, Quaid has proved himself. And as the star of two movies out this winter, his value as a leading man is confirmed. He is beautifully smarmy in “Companion,” a romantic thriller with a sci-fi twist. (Avoid the trailer if you don’t want that twist unfurled.) And he is a sweetheart of an accidental action hero in the punchy thriller “Novocaine,” due March 14, in which he plays a timid assistant bank manager with a congenital inability to feel pain. (Quaid’s own pain threshold: “Not high!”) He is also currently wrapping the fifth and final season of “The Boys,” Amazon’s body fluid-soaked antisuperhero show. He leads the cast as Hughie, a normal-ish guy in an enthusiastically abnormal world. And he has two other movies in postproduction, the thriller “Neighborhood Watch” and the action comedy “Heads of State.”
Sometimes a Quaid character is despicable. More often, he is intensely and effortlessly likable, which seems true of Quaid offscreen. Over breakfast, Quaid was an absolute avalanche of nice, a torrent of approachable. When the waiter brought over bottled water that he hadn’t ordered, he seemed absurdly delighted. “We just got upgraded to first class!” he said.
And sure, it would serve most actors to perform likability when seated across from a journalist, mutually avoiding the cantaloupe. But don’t take it from me. The half dozen of Quaid’s colleagues that I spoke to compulsively repeated words like “giving,” “grounded,” “gracious,” “healthy,” “kind.”
“I can’t emphasize enough how amazing he is and he shouldn’t be,” Drew Hancock, who wrote and directed “Companion,” said. Eric Kripke, the showrunner of “The Boys,” called him “a minor miracle” and Erin Moriarty, his romantic interest on “The Boys,” seemed lightly awed by him.
“He is such an earnestly good person,” she said. “His work ethic, the way he shows up, his ability to be generous, it comes from such an earnestly good place of wanting others to thrive.”
When Quaid was younger, his parents, who wanted him to have a normal-ish childhood, made a rule that he couldn’t audition for professional projects until he was an adult. Quaid limited himself to that camcorder and the occasional school play. “I’m still chasing that high,” he said of a performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” At New York University, he studied at the school’s Experimental Theater Wing (yoga, contact improv, weird monologues) and landed a spot in the sketch comedy group Hammerkatz. (He continues to write and perform sketch comedy, now with a group called Sasquatch.) He shot the first “Hunger Games” movie after his first year and dropped out after his third year, so that he could make more in-person auditions.
His next significant role was on “Vinyl” (2016), the short-lived, 1970s-set Martin Scorsese series. After that the roles came quickly, a part in Steven Soderbergh’s crime film “Logan Lucky” (2017), a romantic lead in the comedy “Plus One” (2019). But in 2018, he booked “The Boys.”
Kripke was sold from that first audition. “We wanted someone who could be a credible romantic interest for a superhero and still be a little nerdy and not quite comfortable in their own skin,” he said. Quaid, whom Kripke described, correctly and affectionately, as “a little too tall for whatever is inside his body,” could do all that.
“It is actually kind of rare to find an actor with that true Everyman ability,” Kripke said.
Variations on Everyman seem to be Quaid’s type. But while he is often cast as the boy next door, he complicates that address. The squares he plays have a few extra angles. Quaid can twist a type, make it gnarly. “Extremely gnarly,” he said.
He can make the uncool cool, offscreen and sometimes on. “He’s very nerdy in the most grounded, charming way,” Sophie Thatcher, his co-star in “Companion,” said. And he knows how to use his too-tall physique — Quaid calls himself a “floppy, floppy boy” — to rollicking effect.
If his outlook is comic, Quaid understands that a lot of that comedy comes from pain. And Quaid is good at pain — also frustration, annoyance, resignation. “I’m trying to always make sure it comes from an honest place, because it can’t seem too cartoony,” he said of his approach. (Although, he does voice many cartoons.) And while plenty of young actors skate by on instinct and charm, Quaid mentioned three separate acting teachers who helped him to unpack the psychologies of his characters.
He began to develop a particular process in the lead-up to “The Boys.” He crafts elaborate back stories for his characters, he lets dreams and mantras guide him, he makes playlists, though he is often torn about whether to post them.
“Part of me is like, Is that really pretentious? Like, Here you go. Here’s how I got into the head space,” he said.
That payoff is evident even amid the genre antics of “Companion” and “Novocaine.” The characters he plays, Josh and Nate, can be written off as types. Josh, as an entitled creep who grossly overestimates his own intelligence. Nate, as a scared-of-his-own-shadow dweeb. But Quaid infuses Josh with a sense of genuine grievance that renders him more real and more dangerous. “The challenge is finding an empathy for a guy that despicable,” Quaid said. (He does not judge his characters while he’s playing them, but he will happily judge them after. “I don’t think he’s ever been to therapy,” he said dismissively of Josh.)
Nate, by contrast, is a good guy. He might come across as overly bland, but Quaid imbues him with a madcap charisma, transforming him from a doofus to an action hero. Or rather, a doofus who is also an action hero. To achieve this, Quaid threw himself into intense workouts, stunt training and fight choreography.
“His performance seems effortless, but it’s very much not,” Robert Olsen, one of the directors of “Novocaine,” said. “His work ethic is through the roof and he has a very cerebral approach to acting. He really gets under the skin of his characters.”
“And he’s so good at flailing his arms,” Dan Berk, the other director, added.
Quaid has a few goals for the next dozen years. He’d like to move into hard comedy and explore other genres. He’d like to write. And while he enjoys the challenges of playing the straight man — the not especially still point in a turning world — he’d like to be a character actor. “Man I want to play more weirdos,” he said.
That may or may not be an option. Quaid has what Olsen described as “a kind of four-quadrant likability. Men love him. He feels like he’d be a great hang. Women love him. He feels like he’d be a great boyfriend.” Which means he may be stuck, for better or worse, as a leading man rather than a weirdo. Although, Quaid’s leading men are also always weirdos.
And even as he’s the first to acknowledge he had an initial leg up — OK, a couple of legs — he is proud of what he has since accomplished. He knows that his parents are proud of him, too. “They are and that means a lot,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be weird if I was like, ‘They’re ashamed.’ But no, they’re proud. They are.”
