Jonah Hill

After making a name for himself with a string of memorable comedy roles, Jonah Hill refused to be typecast and instead landed awards-attracting work – Moneyball, The Wolf Of Wall Street – with some of the greatest directors around. Now, the transition continues as he turns writer/director with Mid90s, a painfully authentic coming-of-age tale.

- Matt Maytum

It’s a cold day in New York when Jonah Hill sits down to talk to Total Film. “It’s like, freezing!” he laugh-shivers. He’s taking a break from his next writing project to talk about his directorial debut, Mid90s, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to positive reviews last September, before opening in the US. It comes to the UK next month.

It’s no surprise that the film was warmly received. It’s a remarkably assured debut, with a keen sense of time, place and character. Set in LA during the middle of the 1990s, it tells the story of a young kid, Stevie (relative unknown Sunny Suljic), who falls in with a crowd of slightly older kids at a skateboard shop, and spends a summer with the cool crowd, finding his tribe, hitting personal milestones, and running into trouble. Stevie also grows distant from his single mother Dabney (Katherine Waterston) and aggressive older brother Ian (Lucas Hedges).

Mid90s has clearly been a passion project for Hill, who spent four years honing the screenplay before directing it. It’s not a project you’d associate with an actor-turned-director, given that it’s low-budget, unshowy and worlds apart from Hill’s on-screen work. But it wouldn’t be the first time Hill has subverted expectations. Born in Los Angeles in 1983, his earliest ambitions were as a playwright, until screen stardom came unexpectedly calling. A friendship with Dustin Hoffman’s children led to an audition for I Heart Huckabees, which would become his first screen appearance.