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On March 9, 2018, John Krasinski and his wife, Emily Blunt, were in the back of a car in Austin heading to the world premiere of A Quiet Place, at SXSW. Krasinski was terrified, and Blunt could tell. He had been working on the final sound mix of the movie (which he cowrote, directed, and starred in alongside his wife) until 5:30 that morning. He left the studio and flew directly to Texas. “Emily was holding my hand, and she was like, ‘You should eat something,’ ” Krasinski remembers. “And I said, ‘What do you mean? We just had lunch.’ And she goes, ‘John, you didn’t eat lunch.’ I totally didn’t realize how the nerves were coming out.” Blunt told him to focus on one thing. And he said he’d be happy if some people clapped at the end of the screening.

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Krasinski had never done anything like this. Sure, he’d directed a couple of movies before, but this was a departure from the dramas and comedies he’d made going back to when he was still best known as Jim Halpert in the beloved TV sitcom The Office. It was a high concept horror movie set in post-apocalyptic America where blind monsters with super hearing will kill anything that makes a noise. Krasinski and Blunt play a husband and wife trying to keep their family alive. And the only way to do so is by staying completely quiet. A broken glass, a creaky floorboard—any noise means certain death.

John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place Part 2 follows what’s left of the Abbott family as they attempt to venture outside of the relative safety of their home. Paramount Pictures

The film plays out in agonizing, stifling near-silence. The family communicates largely through American Sign Language (their daughter is hearing impaired, and is played by the magnificent Millicent Simmonds, who is deaf in real life). In the theater that evening, any tiny sound—a body shifting in a seat, the crunch of popcorn—was amplified like an air horn slicing through the hushed tension. When the credits rolled a taught 90 minutes later, the theater erupted in thunderous applause—only heightened by the tense near-silent film.

It was the best moment of Krasinski’s professional career.

Krasinski says A Quiet Place was not a political film, but a rumination on family and what a parent will do for their children. Jonny Cournoyer/Paramount Pictures/Shutterstock

When Krasinski and I talk in late December he’s having a rare break in his strict routine while working to finish A Quiet Place Part II in time for its March 20 release. His days consist of long hours and nights in the studio, but he built his schedule to make sure he can always eat breakfast with his family and walk his children to school (a luxury that he’s finally able to afford at this point in his career). In fact, when we talk, he’s just made time to attend his preschooler’s end-of-year performance, which was a poetry reading that also included the kids making papier-mâché seals. “I was embarrassingly emotional about it,” he tells me. When I point out that it’s a project that I probably couldn’t have pulled off even in high school, he says, “I still don't know if I could do that right now.”

This article appears in the March 2020 issue of Esquire.

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Krasinski’s commitment to his family should be evident to anyone who’s watched A Quiet Place, a movie that he calls a love letter to his kids. When he first started working on the script he and Blunt had just had their second daughter. In that head space, he thought the idea made for a great metaphor about parenthood and what one would do for their child. Though the movie debuted to almost universal acclaim (a 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), some people didn’t read it as a metaphor for parenthood. This included The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who considered its depiction of a silent white family with guns protecting their home from invaders to be “conspicuously regressive.” But, Krasinski never intended it that way. While he maintains that he’s never going to argue with someone’s reading of his film, he didn’t write it with a political slant.

Krasinski says he wanted to expand on the ideas of A Quiet Place in its sequel. "If the first movie is about parenthood and the promise that you make to your kids that I’ll keep you safe no matter what—that’s, that’s inevitably a false promise,” he says. Paramount Pictures

“I never saw it that way or ever thought of it until it was presented to me in that way,” Krasinski tells me. “It wasn't about being, you know, silent and political time that had nothing to do with that. If anything it was about, you know, going into the dark and, and taking a chance when all hope looked lost, you take, you know, you fight for what's most important to you. Again, my whole metaphor was solely about parenthood.”

And, Krasinski says that he wanted to expand on this idea in the sequel. “If the first movie is about parenthood and the promise that you make to your kids that I'll keep you safe no matter what—that's, that's inevitably a false promise,” he says. At the end of A Quiet Place his character dies in sacrifice of saving his children (Krasinski jokes that if he knew there would be a sequel he wouldn’t have killed off his own character). Early teasers for A Quiet Place Part II show what’s remaining of the family venturing outside the relative safety of their home. “The second one is about that promise being broken and it's about growing up and it's about moving on and dealing with loss,” he says. “For me this whole movie becomes about community. It’s about who do you trust in dark times and the power of relying on other people in dark times.”

Krasinski jokes that if he knew there would be a sequel he wouldn’t have killed off his own character. Jonny Cournoyer/Paramount Pictures/Shutterstock

Krasinski majored in playwriting at Brown University, but that’s not what inevitably kickstarted his career. That was, of course, The Office—the beloved comedy about mid-level grunts at a drab paper company. But, The Office didn’t just launch his acting career, it gave him the means to try his hand at directing. Krasinski spent his first check from The Office directly on obtaining the rights to David Foster Wallace’s short-story collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. Krasinski had done a stage reading on it at Brown, and that experience had inspired what became of his career. And he wanted to make it into a movie. But he had no one to direct.

He was talking about the project with his Office co-star Rainn Wilson, who suggested that Krasinski should just direct the film. “I thought, ‘Wow, I don't know. I can't direct,’ Krasinski remembers. “And he was like, ‘Why not? Just do it.’ So I did.” Brief Interviews With Hideous Men was a strong directorial debut, which gave him the experience and confidence to direct a few later-season Office episodes. In fact, The Office was such a monumentally positive experience for Krasinski, he says he’d 100 percent do an Office reunion.

Krasinski says he would absolutely do an Office reunion. "In many ways, they will always be the most important people in that most important experience in my career," he says. NBC/Shutterstock

“The Office was absolutely everything to me. I mean it is my beginning and my end. I'm pretty sure at the end of my career I'll still be known for Jim. That was my first experience with Hollywood. It was the first creative family I've ever had,” he tells me. “In many ways, they will always be the most important people in that most important experience in my career. So yeah, if they did a reunion, I would absolutely love to do it.”

But, despite having expanded his career to directing while starring on the show, Krasinski found himself without a clear path when The Office ended. “The Office was so big at the time, but I think a lot of people were afraid to cast certain cast members in anything else because they were just known as that one thing, which I completely understood,” he says. “It wasn't an aggressive anger towards it. It was just a reality that I think I wasn't, if I'm honest, genuinely prepared for.”

Krasinski says that after The Office finished it was difficult to break out of the shadow of Jim Halpert. NBC/Shutterstock

He’d tried auditioning for the role of Captain America in the early phase of Disney’s massively successful MCU, but the role ended up going to Chris Evans. “People have a sense that some of us are insanely competitive. I've known Chris forever,” he says. “So as soon as they said Chris Evans got the part, I was like, yeah, look at that guy. Are you kidding me? He is Captain America. And I just saw Chris a couple of weeks ago and we were still laughing about it. I said, ‘I love that you retired in my role.’”

Though, his chance to appear in the MCU hasn’t passed completely. I ask him if he’s seen rumors that he’ll be playing Mister Fantastic, whenever Marvel gets around to tackling the massively popular Fantastic Four heroes.

“I was just about to walk into the worst pun ever, but I was like, that's a fantastic role.That would be awesome,” he tells me. “Marvel wrote the playbook on secrecy and awesome sort of tantalizing lay and wait until everything's announced. I am not committed to the role or anything, but I don't know when they're doing it. But if and when they do it, I would love to talk to them about it.”

For Krasinski, doing the Benghazi movie 13 Hours was not a political move. "I have 11 aunts and uncles and cousins who have been in the military or still are in the military. So it was a big thing on my list to get to do something with the military movie or show or something,” he says. Paramount Pictures/Kobal/Shutterstock

But, after The Office ended in 2013, Krasinski returned to mostly writing and directing in a time when studios still thought of him as Jim Halpert. That’s when he made The Hollars, his first big directing project after The Office. The movie had a strong showing at Sundance and was eventually picked up by Sony Classics. Around that time, the Jim Halpert perception started to shift. As Krasinski explains it, “No one wants to be first in this business,” so it was tough to get a role that really departed from Jim. But, as Krasinski explains it, Michael Bay took a chance on him for the military thriller 13 Hours, a role he wanted because he comes from a large military family. “I certainly was not the first choice for that movie. Michael really was the one who gave me that shot.”

Krasinski says the narrative of the Red-State hero is not what he’s trying to put out there, despite some perceptions of his post-The Office career. Jennifer Clasen/Amazon Studios

That role, he says, directly led to him playing the famed Tom Clancy character Jack Ryan in a new Amazon series. And while in pre-production of the show, one of the producers on Jack Ryan happened to have a draft script for A Quiet Place.

In the few two years, though, as Krasinski starred in big military dramas and directed a film that some read to be an allegory for conservative ideals, a narrative started to develop around his persona. In August of 2018, BuzzFeed wrote an article titled, “John Krasinski Wants To Play Red-State Heroes Without Getting Political” and in November an old video of him saying “the CIA is something that we should all not only cherish, but be saying thank you for every single day” was being heavily criticized on the Internet. Insider wrote, “A brief history of John Krasinski's transformation into a guy who absolutely loves the CIA,” and Mel magazine ran an article saying “Jim From ‘The Office’ Was Always a Cop.”

After A Quiet Place Part 2, Krasinski says he will move on to the third season of Jack Ryan. Then he’s ready and waiting for Marvel’s call. Jennifer Clasen/Amazon Studios

“That narrative is certainly not the narrative I intended to put out there. When people look for something that they want to see, I can’t stop them from a subjective belief in something,” says Krasinski, who cohosted a fundraiser for Elizabeth Warren’s senatorial campaign in 2012. From his perspective, his decision to star in 13 Hours—about the attacks on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi—was not a political one. “I have 11 aunts and uncles and cousins who have been in the military or still are in the military. So it was a big thing on my list to get to do a military movie or show or something,” He says the film was about the individuals and the events of that night. Not politics. “As far as Jack Ryan and the CIA, I always say it’s about the people. I’ll always respect people who put their lives on the line for people like me, who they’ve never met.”

As for that specific CIA comment Krasinski says, he meant for it to be a comment about the men and women of the CIA, not the agency as a whole. “If you start breaking down every single CIA event, do I respect and honor all those? Of course not. Of course not. Do you respect and honor every facet of every single president? Of course not.”

Once A Quiet Place Part II comes out, Krasinski says he’ll go right into production of Jack Ryan Season Three. And after that, he’ll be taking a break to find the next thing he’ll write and direct. He’s open to the possibility of finding more stories to explore in the A Quiet Place universe, and expanding that world, but he’d also like to try something new. “If a Marvel movie came along, maybe, or I'm just looking for great stories and great characters really,” he says.

Matt Miller Culture Editor Matt is the Culture Editor at Esquire where he covers music, movies, books, and TV—with an emphasis on all things Star Wars, Marvel, and Game of Thrones.

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