Child star to adult performer is a path strewn with casualties. But Nick Jonas isn’t one of them. On Broadway at seven, he was writing songs at eight and releasing his debut single ‘Joy To The World (A Christmas Prayer)’ when he was 10. Forming the Jonas Brothers with older siblings Kevin and Joe, he and his bros cornered the market in tween pop, fuelled by appearances on the Disney Channel. Twenty-million album sales, two Grammy nods and 26 Billboard Hot 100 hits later, they’re still surfing the early aughts waves of popularity.
“When we first started, we were thrust into things without really having any playbook to pull from, or even formal training to know what to expect,” says Jonas, when he meets NME, sporting a burgundy suit and close crop. “Our father was one of our co-managers, and a guy named Phil McIntyre, who to this day is still our manager… and we all just learned together. And I think sometimes it’s better to be thrown into things and to find your wings and figure it out.”
Figure it out he did. Now 33, Jonas is like a one-man entertainment army, exploring solo work, commercial tie-ins (shoes, fragrances, tequila) and, most intriguingly, acting. The Jumanji franchise, in which he features as a teen trapped inside the eponymous jungle-bound video game, has racked up big box office. But there’s more. Last year, Jonas stepped back onto Broadway in the Jason Robert Brown play The Last Five Years, shortly before the Jonas Brothers released their seventh album ‘Greetings From Your Hometown’.
“In ‘Power Ballad’, I’m playing a version of myself: a pop star coming out of being in a group to being a solo artist”
“I really enjoy all of it,” Jonas admits. “Getting a chance to split my time between acting, performing and writing. I think my main focus is always just to stay as busy as possible, but also as inspired and as creative [as possible]. One of the places I really get to do that is on the stage, in the Broadway sense, because I’m combining acting and singing and performance. It’s a real challenge, because it’s a really intense schedule. You’ve got [multiple] shows a day, six days a week.”
If stage work, like a concert, offers Jonas an immediate interaction with fans, he’s just as obsessed with making movies. Back in 2019, Jonas launched his own production company, Image 32, initially producing Netflix holiday special Dash & Lily. Still, you can sense the frustration in Jonas’ voice. “The development world is such a long and tedious process, and one that, at times can be discouraging,” he sighs, “because it just feels like ‘Is anything ever going to get made?’”
This month, Jonas hits cinemas in Power Ballad, a joyful comedy that sharply sums up the struggle of a musician, like Jonas, to be taken seriously as he makes that transition from teen idol to adult artist. “In a lot of ways,” he says, “I’m playing kind of a version of myself, a pop star coming out of being in a group to being a solo artist, but he’s dealing with a lot of things that I feel like everybody faces as they just grow and get older.”
His character Danny Wilson is a fading boy band star who gets re-energised when he meets American ex-pat Rick Power. Played by Ant-Man star Paul Rudd, Power is the married, middle-aged lead singer in a covers band that plays weddings in Ireland. After meeting at the nuptials of an old friend, Wilson and Power enjoy a boozy creative sesh that sees them conjure up a song that later revitalises the latter’s career. Now if only he’d done the decent thing and given Power a credit…
Songwriting, of course, has been a part of Jonas’s life for decades now. “I started writing songs when I was about eight years old with my dad,” he explains. “I would drive into New York City because I was doing Broadway shows. We lived in New Jersey, and we’d have about a 45 minute drive. And so that time would be spent either listening to music and learning about the great songwriters – James Taylor, Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Bee Gees, The Beatles – and then also trying to write on my own.”
With this in his DNA, it’s little wonder Jonas fell for Power Ballad, co-written by Irish filmmaker John Carney, something of a specialist in music movies after his 2007 Oscar-winning hit Once and the charming 2016 comedy Sing Street, a tale of kids in a band in Dublin. “John’s incredible,” says Jonas. “I’ve been a fan of his for a long time. Obviously Once… I loved the film, and then the stage version was phenomenal. And then Sing Street is really in my top 10 movies of all time.”
He was stoked when he received the script, with songs and score again penned by Carney and Gary Clark, the duo behind Sing Street. “I was so excited to get to talk to him about his vision and also the music component,” says Jonas, “because, at least on the page, there was room for some really great songs. And he played me a few of the records that are in there. He’s got a very specific style of writing, both the script, but also the music. And I think they go hand-in-hand.”
The combination of the goofy Rudd and the earnest Jonas is a delicious one on screen. Working with Rudd was “a dream”, Jonas says. “I had very high hopes and expectations, but he just surpassed all those and blew me away as a person and a co-actor.” Rudd may be a gifted comedian, but Jonas was surprised by another of his co-star’s assets. “What I was most impressed by was actually Paul’s musicality and his singing. People will see when they watch the film, but… he’s obviously a brilliant actor, but a really talented musician as well.”
Shot in and around Dublin, Jonas had only ever been to the Irish city for the odd night, “coming in and out” when the Jonas Brothers played there. This time, he got the chance to “find my spots”, as he puts it. “I’m an avid golfer, so I got to play a lot of golf while I was there,” he says, waxing lyrical about the course at Portmarnock in County Dublin, as well as Dublin’s culinary hotspots (an Indian restaurant called Pickle and a bistro called Note, in case you’re planning a jaunt there).
The difference between he and his character, perhaps, is that Jonas has evolved his songwriting over the years. “As I look up now and think about the many years I’ve spent writing songs, I think I have a deeper perspective because of where I’m at personally,” he says. “So much of what I write about comes from my real life experiences and relationships and love, and not just in the romantic sense, but also with our beautiful daughter now, and what that feels like to write from the perspective of a father.”
He’s referring, of course, to his four-year-old daughter, Malti Marie, who he and his wife – Indian movie star and former Miss World, Priyanka Chopra – welcomed into their lives via surrogacy. So have his musical tastes shifted since he became a father? “I listen to a lot more Bluey these days and Moana. So I’m getting well-versed in all the children’s music that’s out there,” he chuckles. In truth, life is now offering him “so many great strings to pull on creatively”, thanks to his relationship with Chopra.
They first met in 2017 at an Oscars party, and married a year-and-a-half later – with Jonas later claiming he knew she was “the one”. “I think anytime your depth of love and relationship just gets that much deeper and grows, your creative life, whatever that may be, expands that much further. And so there’s the music part of that, but also on screen and off screen… the things I’m doing to get inspired, I think, is directly related to those relationships being as meaningful as they are to me.”
Jonas and his siblings are still making music too. The band split in 2013, three years before Jonas made his indie movie debut in the hard-hitting ‘hazing’ campus drama Goat, but reunited six years later with the single ‘Sucker’. The break worked wonders, it seems. “There’s a nostalgic energy to everything surrounding me and the work I do with my brothers,” says Jonas, who is discovering now that parents who were fans back in the day are introducing their kids to their music.
“There are things that are relevant to [the new fans] now, at whatever it is – the early teen years – that were relevant to me then,” he says. “So that generational effect is what you dream of.” Streaming has also been helpful to spread the Jonas gospel. “We have this wonderful renaissance of people discovering music on their own in the same way that I used to do when I would go into a CD or record store with my dad and just pick through different cassettes or CDs to find something that, to me, was new, but to my dad was something that he loved when he was my age.”
Does he have songs from the back catalogue he hopes will be appreciated anew? He nods. “There’s songs like ‘I Believe’, for instance, which was on our album ‘Happiness Begins’, which is one of my favourites that I’ve ever written, [which] at the time, was overshadowed by ‘Sucker’ and some of the other singles on the album.”
While the music is gaining fresh audiences, the screen work is too. He’s just completed Jumanji: Open World, the third in the trilogy, but he’s now shooting White Elephant, a festive-themed horror with Kathryn Newton. Understandably, he wants to keep on pulling surprises, rabbit-like, out of the hat. “I’m going to continue to find projects that, perhaps I wouldn’t be considered for, or someone doesn’t see [me] in that light,” he says. “So I can continue to grow and just get better.” Right on.
‘Power Ballad’ is in UK cinemas from May 29