Some years ago, Caleb Landry Jones and Jim Jarmusch wandered Lower Manhattan in search of a piano. They hadn’t yet worked together, but Jarmusch, the celebrated indie filmmaker, was impressed by the actor’s back-to-back appearances in “Get Out,” “The Florida Project” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” all released in 2017.
The pair linked up and were hanging out in New York when Jones announced that he wanted to play Jarmusch something on the instrument.
“I didn’t even know you made music,” Jarmusch recalls saying to Jones, who responded with something like, “Well, that’s questionable, but I want to play you this thing.”
They never did find a piano, but Jones made up for it by sending Jarmusch samples of his music. Jarmusch, a musician himself who performs in the rock band Sqürl, was blown away by the peculiarity of Jones’s genre-less sound. The director has described it in the past — and does so again in conversation with The Washington Post — as “like if John Lennon and Brian Wilson were on psychoactive drugs in Daniel Johnston’s basement.”
“I found out, musically, his mind is on fire,” adds Jarmusch, who later connected Jones with people who run the experimental record label Sacred Bones.
It’s the sort of wild, folksy sound you might expect from Jones, 31, whose roles are largely bonded by their oddball nature, sometimes charming and at other times creepy. He has the enviable career of a Hollywood character actor, managing to fly relatively under the radar while booking steady, distinct projects helmed by the likes of Jarmusch, David Lynch, Martin McDonagh and Jordan Peele. If Jones’s name alone doesn’t spark recognition, his reddish locks, gentle Texan drawl and almost cartoonish mannerisms just might.
He is hardly the first actor to also pursue a musical career, but his music is notable in how it lends to the same unpredictable persona as his on-screen projects. Some of it might have to do with the timing. He wrote his new album “Gadzooks Vol. 1,” for instance, while in Albuquerque shooting “Finch,” the upcoming post-apocalyptic drama in which he stars alongside Tom Hanks as the android creation of Hanks’s inventor character.
Jones video-chats with The Post in late August from outside a house he is renting in Los Angeles, where he is already in the midst of finishing a follow-up to “Gadzooks,” released Friday by Sacred Bones. He is much more modest and laid-back than the characters he plays on-screen, smoking as he leans toward his camera and speaks with slow deliberation about the process behind his recent work.
“I just needed to get stuff off my chest,” he says, “but that’s always the case.”
Listening to "Gadzooks" feels like you're running through a fun house. On a track called "The Loon," Jones's lazy vocals float over carnivalesque music, drifting in and out as though he were a ghost haunting the place. "Yesterday Will Come" is a buoyant, freewheeling tune capturing the Lennon component of Jarmusch's imagined scenario. The album rejects definition, Jones seemingly unafraid to give into his every whim. At times, such as on the 20-minute album closer "This Won't Come Back," he sounds as though he were British — something he says sort of just happens naturally.
“I just hear a damn English accent or stuff like that, you know,” he explains. “And I don’t go, ‘No, Caleb,’ I go, ‘Okay!’ and then start going about it that way. I kind of feel it out like you do when you’re stretching. You’re stretching, stretching, feeling how far you can go — oh! You can’t go that far. Okay. And then you pull back.”
It’s a more confident approach than what he started out with as a teenager in the Dallas area, where he played drums in a worship band that led him to explore music outside church as well. Not unlike his brief role as an amateur drummer on the television series “Friday Night Lights,” Jones would jam with a friend for hours on the weekend, attempting to mimic other groups — Radiohead, Franz Ferdinand, even DC Talk. He was so worried about seeming professional, he says, that he stopped himself from coloring outside the lines.
While Jones still plays on the Casio keyboard from his teenage years, he learned to shed those inhibitions. What he sets out to explore these days is less defined. Heartbreak drives some of it, but other parts of life trickle in as well. While shooting “Finch,” he found himself itching to dig further into some aspect of the robot’s childlike state but couldn’t quite put his finger on what. So he picked up a guitar from a nearby pawnshop, plopped in front of an episode of “South Park” and played until he thought, “Oh, that’s good, I should put lyrics to that.” Soon enough, he had “Gadzooks.”
The album is Jones’s second, following a debut Pitchfork almost admiringly referred to last year as “bombastic and unreasonable” for how stubbornly it defies easy listening. His music certainly isn’t for everyone, but that’s part of its unusual appeal.
“You’re in a dark room and it’s not until there’s a little light over there that you realize how big the room is,” Jones says. “My music does that for myself, I suppose. I can only hope it’s reaching others in a similar way.”
In a more sinister sense, "bombastic and unreasonable" could be a fitting description for one of Jones's most prominent roles — Jeremy Armitage in Peele's horror film "Get Out," the brother of a White woman who brings her Black boyfriend home to meet her family. As the movie goes on, the boyfriend, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), increasingly realizes the Armitages aren't as benevolent as they first seemed. Jeremy's behavior clues Chris in.
During the indelible dinner scene, Jeremy regales Chris with a story about his sister’s high school years before zeroing in on what he really wants to know: “Did you ever get in street fights as a kid?” he asks, seemingly assessing Chris’s physical strength. Jones, whose posture reflects Jeremy’s shiftiness throughout the scene, hunches menacingly toward Kaluuya at this point, his voice raspy and eyes staring straight ahead.
The film hit theaters in February 2017, just three months before Jones portrayed Willem Dafoe’s son in Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project,” and nine before Sam Rockwell threw him out of a window in McDonagh’s “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”
“Not everybody can do the Daniel Day-Lewis, you know, take a year to get into the character and another year to do it,” Jones jokes of his busy year. “That’s beautiful, but I don’t know if I could live in something for a year.”
Jones is exactly the sort of guy you’d expect to see pop up in a Coen brothers ensemble, so it’s fitting that the first acting gig he ever landed was “Boy on Bike” in 2007’s “No Country for Old Men.” He’s a shape-shifter, even playing the literal mutant Banshee in 2011’s “X-Men: First Class” — the big-budget superhero flick was such a shock to his system that he worried it would be “the pinnacle of what I was going to do.”
He still chases that uneasy feeling, somewhat. The older he gets, he says, the more he feels drawn to considering roles that “frighten you or scare you.” He recently won best actor at the Cannes Film Festival for diving into the psyche of a mass murderer in “Nitram.”
These wild card tendencies are what initially caught the attention of Jarmusch, who cast Jones in the 2019 zombie satire “The Dead Don’t Die” as a kooky gas station storekeeper. The director considers Jones to be a “feral actor,” something he insists is a compliment.
“He’s kind of like a very focused wild animal,” Jarmusch says. “You can’t predict and you don’t really want to put a leash on him, but you want him confined within the confines of the scene and character. Once you establish those, the beautiful thing about Caleb for me was letting him have a longer leash and seeing what he would do.”
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