"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."

"At this point I'm already in Suicidal Tendencies and I'm walking around school listening to Korn and Suicidal. I always had my headphones on and I had long hair, I kind of looked like a girl. I remember my friend called Carla, she gave me her copy of Evil Empire. It was really dope, it was one of the coolest moments ever, because she gave me a copy of her CD and then she gave me a kiss literally, and she said, 'this is yours.' I remember putting it in my CD player in my car and I've never sonically heard anything like that in my entire life. That shit blew my fucking mind. I didn't know what the hell to do with myself. I was like, 'who the fuck plays an instrument like this? What the hell is this?' Tom Morello's guitar lines were ridiculous. To this day, it's still ridiculous. If Jimi Hendrix were alive he would be like, 'what the hell is Tom Morello drinking!?' Then on top of that, add the part where they're from Los Angeles; it's a bit of a prideful moment for me. I don't ever have these moments where I'm like, 'Yeah, they from LA', but Rage Against The Machine, I felt like it was me. This is again identity; who this is and what this is – this is the sound of where I come from, this is how we sound. Then you mix Suicidal Tendencies in there, and I'm touring at this age already, so this was this made me want to play harder and more aggressive and made me want to exude more energy and play with power. That's where I learned that, and it moulded my years in Suicidal Tendencies. So Evil Empire, if I put it on in an Uber everybody's going deaf. It's Rage Against The Machine: I don't care – it's still too good. It's still too fucking good. They're getting ready to go back on tour this year. I'm gonna be the guy in the front row with the mouth guard and boxing gloves. Rage Against the Machine changed my life and will change yours on arrival."