"My last two are gonna be Whiplash and Juno, for obvious reasons. [laughs] Juno came along, what is that, 10 years ago now? That came along when I had a nicely established career going and was paying my mortgage and putting my kids through their outrageous L.A. private school. We’d moved out from New York to L.A. two or three years before that, and I’d met Jason. I’d done Jason Reitman’s first feature, Thank You For Smoking, which is also an underrated film, by the way. Actually, he joined our semi-regular poker game when I was playing it at the time. And he quickly became, from a guy who basically barely knew what beats what in poker, he quickly became one of the best players at the table just because he’s such a smart guy. But we were playing at my friend’s house, and Jason showed up and he just handed me this paper script and he said, “Hey, I’m gonna be working on this,” or, “I just got this,” or something sort of vague, and he said, “You gotta read this. This is so good. It’s by this writer nobody ever heard of.” That night or the next day, I read the script, and of course immediately fell in love with the part of Juno’s dad, Mac MacGuff. You know, [Reitman] hadn’t said anything to me. He hadn’t said, “Look at this part,” or, “Look at that part.” So, I’m thinking, you know, maybe he wants me to play the drugstore guy in the first scene, or maybe he just wanted to share it with me because we’re pals now. I don’t know. It wasn’t until days later — and I wasn’t gonna say, “Hey, I wanna play this part” — it wasn’t until days later that he said, “Oh, God, of course, J.K. I want you to play the dad. Of course I do.” And he said, “I got the whole movie cast already in my head. I hope we get everybody I want.” Of course, the people financing the movie wanted him to get some famous pop star to play Juno, and they wanted to get some very well-known actor to play Juno’s dad. There were lists of guys that were way more famous than I was, but they kept throwing at Jason saying, “Look, if you want to get this movie made and get the budget that you want to have, these are the kind of guys that you need to play Juno’s dad.” For both Ellen Page and for me — and really for most of the characters, for Michael Cera, for Allison Janney — you know, these were all the people that he had in mind as soon as he read the script, but he knew he wanted the cast in the movie. He went to bat for all of us, and Ellen and I actually had to do a full on screen test that he set up with film, on actual film, at a sound stage. Jason had us do a couple scenes from the movie to convince the money people that we were the actors that were gonna help make the movie the best it could be. So that was a really nice vote of confidence from Jason, who, by the way, I just emailed five minutes before you called, because I’m gonna be doing his next movie, The Front Runner, which we start shooting in like less than two weeks."

"I felt bad about including compilations or greatest hits but if I'm honest, there the ones I go to. And I could say that about Elton John – sometimes you just want to hear the really big hits. Certain albums do stick with you forever but I'm a bit more attuned to the big, big singles. Maybe it's the way I grew up but also it's the initiation I had into my own hits. Even though I'm the youngest of four and grew up around a lot of prog rock albums – in fact, I know Yes off by heart. When Rick Wakeman played Hampton Court Palace a few years ago, he said I'm gonna do the whole of The Six Wives of Henry VIII, I bought a dozen tickets immediately! Because I knew my brother, sisters, partners would all want to go. It was bonkers and amazing. I could have gone full prog rock to be honest [with this baker's dozen selection]! Sorry – what were we talking about? Ah yes, Al Green! My sister and brothers were my entry point for music. I would have listened to quite a bit of Bowie when I was a kid and remember being quite a bit frightened by him – I couldn't work this guy out. One minute he looks like an alien and he just looked a bit odd and also some of the songs were odd – I didn't know what he was on about at all. When someone changed his whole persona the whole time at the same time I'm beginning to look at girls at the same time and then wondering is Bowie a girl? What is he? He confused me! But I definitely got to know a lot of music simply because it was just on in the house. We had one record player – I wanted the Jungle Book album but that wasn't going to happen! There's a track on my album all about having two older brothers and an older sister and it's called 'The Good Old Days' and I mention things like Rick Wakeman and lots of other bands and I also remember my brother John not letting me touch his albums!. My sister took me to see [my first gig which was] Camel when I was ten years old. Weirder than that, I was on tour, thirteen or fourteen years later in Japan and myself and the road crew were in the lounge sharing our first gig experiences. So it goes around and around each person and I'm thinking and shuddering 'they're not gonna believe me, not gonna believe me' until I say it: ""Camel, Manchester Free Trade Hall."" Two of the crew immediately jump up: ""I did the sound at that gig"" says the first! ""I did the projection at that gig!"", says the second! It literally turned something on in me. They had this massive, huge screen behind their gigs – they had this album called Mirage and another one called Snow Goose and you had these images of the pyramids and what have you. As a kid I did not know what was going on, it was another universe. Although to be honest, those projections were probably a bit naïve compared to [what you can experience] today."