When he was a hyperactive 11-year-old growing up in New York City, the actor Jerry O’Connell had a mantra. It was one drilled into him by his mother, which he deployed whenever he sensed he was about to get into trouble: “Just sit on your hands and shut up.” He’d say it to himself in school, in public, and even on the set of his first acting job – which happened to be filmmaker Rob Reiner’s immortal coming-of-age classic Stand by Me.
“I ad-libbed something in a scene on my first day, and I felt like I really screwed up,” he recalls now, 40 years after playing the movie’s pudgy, well-intentioned Vern in the adaptation of Stephen King’s novella. “Because I was supposed to sit on my hands and shut up. But then Rob Reiner came from behind the camera saying, ‘Dude, that’s what I’m talking about! Keep going, get crazier!’” O’Connell smiles. “A lightbulb went off. I realised, oh God, I don’t have to sit on my hands and shut up. I just have to work for people like Rob Reiner.”
O’Connell grew up and thinned out. And, based on the amount of teen movies he made in the Nineties, hunked out, really. He’s 52 now, and Stand by Me is still the project he’s asked about the most. It was about four young boys (also played by Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman and the late River Phoenix) who find a dead body during a long, lazy summer. It was also about friendship and boyhood and pain – universal emotional touchstones as effective in 1986 as they are now. O’Connell had the time of his life shooting the movie that summer. But the experience has also been overshadowed in the years since, first by Phoenix’s death in 1993 – at the age of 23, from a drug overdose – and then by Reiner’s horrifying murder, along with his wife Michele, in the days before Christmas last year. (Their son Nick has been charged with their killings, to which he has pleaded not guilty, and is currently awaiting trial.)
open image in gallery“There’s a tragedy to the movie now,” O’Connell says. “I can’t look at a poster of it without feeling abject sadness. I’ve still not recovered from River’s death. I was significantly younger than him – I was 11, he was 15 – and genuinely every older kid I knew back then was a bit of a bully, or someone who wanted absolutely nothing to do with younger kids. River was the exact opposite. He told me where to stand on a set, how to act on a set, he told me about lighting. He was our leader, and so kind. He really shaped how I treat people at work, and when he passed away…” He trails off. “There’s a hole in my life that will never be filled.”
When I mention Reiner, O’Connell pauses, swallows. “A lot of young actors have horror stories about being on sets. There are bad parents, who force kids into acting. There are levels of abuse. For me, working as a young performer was positively freeing. And Rob…” He pauses again. “Rob took us all whitewater rafting. He’d play softball with us on weekends. It was about the experience. It wasn’t just about the movie. The gift Rob Reiner gave me was making sure that, for all of us, Stand by Me wasn’t just a job. It was a life-long memory.”
It’s the only time in conversation with O’Connell that isn’t, well, sort of ridiculous. We’re ostensibly here to talk about a new comedy he’s starring in, called Summer’s Last Resort, but he’s all over the place when it comes to topics. He has a livewire quality, zipping between ideas inelegantly, always pivoting to absurd non-sequiturs. He thinks aloud about the strange vertical flap on the crotch of Y-front underwear, for instance. “What’s with the little hole to do your business? Because I never use that hole. I just pull them down, you know?” He speaks with such deadpan sincerity that I can’t quite tell if he’s even joking most of the time. I like him a lot. I imagine he’s absolutely exhausting to live with.
I did a movie that was not well received called, um, ‘Fat Slags’. I’m embarrassed even saying the term. I’m sure it’s highly offensive
Anyway, O’Connell’s had a curious career since Stand by Me. After the movie, he enrolled in university, majoring in film studies, then started acting again – as an in-demand young quarterback in Jerry Maguire (1996), as Neve Campbell’s doomed college boyfriend in Scream 2 (1997), as live-action foil to an anthropomorphic kangaroo in the notorious comedy flop Kangaroo Jack (2003). And now he doesn’t really act as much. “I’ve been, as you guys in the UK call it, a TV presenter for the last few years,” he says. He spent three years as a co-host on The Talk – think a more gender-diverse US version of Loose Women – and presented the game show Pictionary. A few days after we speak, he’s announced as a new panellist on the reality show spin-off series Big Brother: Unlocked. He’s great at all of this, but…
“It does hurt my acting career,” he sighs. He was in a Broadway play with Alan Rickman in 2011 when he was first offered a guest-host role on a daytime talk show. Rickman was dead-set against it. “I remember him saying, in his Professor Snape voice, ‘Don’t do those talk shows too much – if you want to be an actor, you must have an air of mystery.’” O’Connell’s Rickman impression, I promise, is astoundingly good. “I hate to say this, but Mister Rickman was correct, and I didn’t listen.”
He caveats this by saying he does indeed love TV presenting, and reality TV in general: he and his wife Rebecca Romijn – of Ugly Betty fame, and Mystique in the X-Men films – spend much of their time discussing the ins and outs of shows like Real Housewives, 90 Day Fiancé and The Bachelor. “It’s so much more interesting than talking about the Strait of Hormuz, you know? A lot of couples bond over their children, their pets, their love of reading. My wife and I only bond over reality television.” (He and Romijn have twin daughters, so he’s probably joking. Maybe.)
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open image in galleryStill, you sense that he misses when he was an actor full-time, and now understands that just one or two bad choices can knock you off the A-list real quick. Take the one time he’s worked in Britain, a fact he finds frustrating since he has – through his British dad – a UK passport.
“I did a movie that was not well-received,” he begins. “Called, um, Fat Slags.”
Excuse me?
“Fat… Slags… ?” O’Connell says the title with such American apprehension that it’s basically adorable. “I’m embarrassed even saying the term. I’m sure it’s highly offensive.”
In case you don’t remember it (of course you don’t), Fat Slags was the 2004 film adaptation of the notorious Viz comic about two overweight, oversexed slobs in boiler suits. O’Connell played their mutual American love interest, who finds the women irresistible after sustaining a head injury. Geri Halliwell, Naomi Campbell and Ricky Gervais were in it, too, along with Beppe from EastEnders and Eamonn Holmes (as himself). “In my defence, I knew nothing about Viz,” O’Connell laughs. “I was assured it was hilarious and going to be a hit movie. I was assured it was going to change the trajectory of my career. I was told if I didn’t do it, I’d be really regretful. I was… wrong.”
He says he’s grateful for a project like Summer’s Last Resort, which is now available on the streaming platform Tubi. “Because I’ve been doing a lot of TV presenting of late, I’m really excited for people to see this movie,” he says. “I believe I still have it. And my true love is acting, you know?”
O’Connell plays a gooberish stepdad trying just a bit too hard to convince his stepdaughter (M3GAN’s Violet McGraw) he’s the right boyfriend for her mum (One Tree Hill’s Sophia Bush). You can tell O’Connell relished the opportunity to play a real character here, someone totally free of vanity and more than happy to be the butt of a joke – there’s a scene in which he performs emergency CPR on a whale, which would probably become a bit of a “Cameron Diaz with fluids in her hair”-style sensation if comedy movies, you know, still went to cinemas.
He was drawn to the movie partly because in his on-camera dynamic with McGraw’s Summer, he saw his own relationship with his daughters, Dolly and Charlie. “They’re 17 now, and I really try to be honest with them about how scary life is, how scary making a living is, how scary staying married is,” he explains. “But if you just talk openly about all of those things, and really learn to embrace the fear, everything is easier to deal with.”
For him, it all goes back to Rob Reiner. “The dude just changed all of our lives,” he says. “And not because he put us in a movie that was a big hit and that we’re still talking about 40 years later, but because at a really vulnerable age, he made us feel seen. That meant the world.”
‘Summer’s Last Resort’ is streaming on Tubi