Jason Bateman, one of the nicest men in Hollywood, has a real talent for playing assholes.
The wry everyman with a hidden vein of creep has become something of a Bateman archetype.
Think of his financial planner turned drug cartel enabler Marty Byrde in Netflix’s Ozark. Or Mark Loring in 2007’s Juno, the prospective adoptive dad revealed to be a boundary-crossing man-child. More recently, he’s been Clark Forrest, the local weatherman eager to scratch his dark sexual kinks in the HBO series DTF St. Louis. But with Vince Friedken in Netflix’s crime drama Black Rabbit, Bateman finally goes full scumbag.
When we first meet Vince, he’s hanging out in a low-rent Reno casino, waiting to do a shady deal with some shady folks to sell some (obviously pilfered) rare coins. The deal goes bad, violently so, and Vince hightails it back to New York, looking for a bailout from brother Jake (played by Jude Law), owner of Manhattan’s hippest restaurant. Vince brings his chaos with him. His outstanding gambling debts to a local mobster (Oscar winner Troy Kotsur, of CODA) threaten Jake’s business and the life he’s built away from his self-destructive sibling. Bateman even looks lousy: Vince’s greasy hair and untamed beard are a world away from his usual clean-cut presentation.
The performance earned Bateman an Emmy nomination for acting, while his work behind the camera on Black Rabbit also earned him a directing nomination — a fitting double recognition for an actor increasingly drawn to the other side of the camera.
“I remember thinking, ‘I bet the audience would expect to see me in the part that Jude ended up playing,’ ” says Bateman, reflecting on how he and Law were cast by Black Rabbit creators Zach Baylin and Kate Susman before it was decided who would play which brother. “It would have been more comfortable for me [to play Jake]. But I had a real good take on Vince. He’s a very broken guy. He has a sense of humor, but he’s very aware of what a failure he is. I’ve known a lot of people in my life like that, people who are just heartbreakingly ill-equipped to manage the things that they find themselves involved in.”
After his career as a child actor in ’80s family sitcoms — Little House on the Prairie, Silver Spoons, The Hogan Family — shows where “the big note is always: Make sure your character is likable,” Bateman says he finds it more “exciting” to play the noxious jerk. Even one as toxic as Vince.
“[Vince] starts pretty unlikable, and I play him pretty unlikable as well,” he says. “Then, by virtue of his bad decisions and getting backed into a bunch of corners, he becomes much more vulnerable and apologetic, and hopefully that earns it back in time for the ending to be satisfactory.”
Bateman was determined to test himself on Black Rabbit, and not just in front of the camera. He directed the first two episodes of the show. Baylin and Susman “basically asked me to do what I had done on Ozark and The Outsider,” he says, “direct the first couple of episodes and then oversee the whole project, hire the other directors and keep a consistency going from the first episode to the last.”
Bateman brought in his Ozark collaborators Laura Linney and Ben Semanoff to direct two episodes each of Black Rabbit and picked Justin Kurzel, who directed Law in the 2024 crime thriller The Order, to close out the show with its action-packed two-episodefinale.
On Black Rabbit, Bateman the director takes the color palette and dark lighting of Ozark and roughs it up. Grainy, low-key cinematography from Igor Martinović and Peter Konczal and gritty production design from True Detective‘s Alex DiGerlando give the show a look and feel closer to that of ’70snoir.
The shaky handheld anxiety of the Safdie brothers is also a clear influence.
“Uncut Gems was something that was a good shorthand for all of us,” says Bateman. “It was something that was very current and took place in the same part [of Manhattan]. That visual style, the editorial pace, even the kind of soundscape really fits well to the writing and with what the two brothers are going through. But there’s a lot of anxiety [in Uncut Gems]. We knew if we had that level constantly through all eight episodes, it would be a bit much. So, we tried to throttle them on and off, onscreen and also with the writing.”
The one area of directing Bateman needed no help with was managing actors.
“It’s challenging for some directors that have never acted before or even taken an acting class. Being an actor myself makes that part of the job easier,” he says. “I understand what a really weird thing acting is, pretending to come up with all of these words right in the moment. I mean, really, it’s total bullshit. We’re all just professional liars.”
Bateman and Law come from very different acting backgrounds. Law came up in fringe and musical theater in Britain, while Bateman honed his craft on the sets of many a multicam sitcom. Their approach to performance is also distinct. Law imagined a backstory for Jake and Vince, a history from childhood to the moment we meet them onscreen. Bateman has no need for bios, preferring to work off the script alone.
But Bateman and Law’s chemistry onscreen in Black Rabbit is immediate. They are utterly believable as bickering brothers with a lifetime of shared trauma, resentment and lingering affection.
“We didn’t spend any time developing that; it just came naturally,” says Bateman. “Maybe I’m overanalyzing, but Jude is just such an incredible person and so professional, he’s such a good guy and we worked together so well — us having chemistry was just about the easiest thing in the world.”
The hard part was directing. “Acting is more comfortable, directing is more challenging,” says Bateman. “It’s something I have to work a bit harder on. But it is something that, at this stage of my life and career, I’m enjoying a lot because it calls on everything that I’ve learned over the last — what is it? — 45 years of experience.”
His first Emmy win, after decades in the business, came in 2019 for outstanding directing on Ozark. Bateman has finished shooting his second feature as a director, the crime comedy The Cackling of the Dodos, starring Sam Rockwell and Woody Harrelson, and has several directing gigs in the works, including The Partner, an adaptation of a John Grisham novel set to star Tom Holland.
“I still love acting immensely and pursue it, you know, 110 percent,” he says. “But I’m simultaneously looking at all of my options as a director, oftentimes on the same project. It’s incredibly rewarding for me, and incredibly challenging. Maybe I’m a masochist. But I’m looking at things that are right at the edge of what I think I can handle.”
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.