His downtown Manhattan offices, when I visited in January 2020, were adorned with posters of favorite films like “The Apartment,” “The Graduate” and “Ordinary People” (as well as a Spanish-language advertisement for “Kramer Contra Kramer”).Ī smaller front room was decorated with family photos and a birthday present that Blunt had given Krasinski on the set of the first “Quiet Place”: a framed picture of Steven Spielberg in the mouth of the mechanical shark from “Jaws,” a movie that he and Blunt watched at least eight times when they started dating.Īfter “The Office” concluded, Krasinski starred in “ 13 Hours,” Michael Bay’s dramatization of the 2012 Benghazi attacks, bringing him to the attention of Bay’s former producing partners Andrew Form and Brad Fuller. He is also an ardent fan of popular cinema. He is an unapologetically earnest guy who, when he gets excited about a shot working or a line of dialogue landing just right, exclaims things like “Yahtzee!” If you only recognize the 41-year-old Krasinski from his role as the goofy, gallant Jim Halpert on “The Office,” you already know more than you realize about him. “It’s usually on your best take as well.” “That has happened so many times,” she said. Krasinski called cut the take was spoiled and would have to be tried again.Īs Blunt later explained, she had grown used to such interruptions. Suddenly the stillness was punctured by a staccato tick-tick-ticking: the film in one of the cameras had come to the end of its reel and was flapping obnoxiously.
Though Murphy despaired for humanity, Blunt told him not to lose faith because. The actors began their scene: Blunt, now a hardened survivor of the alien invasion, had entered the hiding place of a disheveled holdout played by the “Peaky Blinders” star Cillian Murphy. Standing on a cavernous sound stage built to look like the subterranean chambers of an abandoned steel mill, he called for silence and the instructions reverberated in rapid whispers as crew members conveyed them to the farthest reaches of the set. Nearly two years ago, in August 2019, Krasinski was directing his cast on the set of “A Quiet Place Part II” in Buffalo. He added, “I don’t think anyone’s brain was prepared for what was really about to happen.”
Speaking in a video call from Budapest, where he recently resumed filming the Amazon action series “Jack Ryan,” he told me that he spent the past year hovering “somewhere between optimism and naïveté” as he waited for “A Quiet Place Part II” to finally arrive. Its release will also be a significant test of “A Quiet Place” as a franchise for Paramount, a studio that could really use one, and of Krasinski himself, an affable actor-director who hadn’t made a mark as a commercial filmmaker until he made the original movie. “What is the fate of this movie? When do people see it? How do they see it? Do they see it? That started to get pretty weird.” “It was just the most bizarre circumstance,” he told me recently. Krasinski spent that time thinking mostly about the safety of his family, but when he contemplated the uncertain state of his industry he also wondered what would happen to his film. The release of “A Quiet Place Part II” was postponed. An unseen enemy drove people into seclusion once-thriving locales turned empty and entire industries were put on hold. Instead, in the days that followed, the world turned into a kind of horror movie itself. He told the crowd at Jazz at Lincoln Center how excited he was to share the movie with them and, shortly, with audiences everywhere. He proudly walked the red carpet for its premiere at the Rose Theater as he posed for photographs with Emily Blunt, his wife and the film’s star.
On the night of March 8, 2020, John Krasinski was celebrating the imminent release of his new post-apocalyptic thriller, “A Quiet Place Part II,” which he wrote and directed.