ON THE MONEY

Moneyball co-star JONAH HILL talks to Prestige Hong Kong about his screen career and working with Brad Pitt

FOR JONAH HILL, shooting the film Moneyball with movie icon Brad Pitt, director Bennett Miller and Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin was a serious business. The young actor, however, still managed to have a little fun.

“Brad started it,” says Hill. “We had these little golf carts that we were driving around on the set and we got a bit competitive and began racing. There was a little bit of a war going on with those golf carts and it got pretty crazy.”

They may have been competing in their golf carts off screen, but on screen Hill and Pitt play staunch allies and loyal teammates.  Moneyball is based on the true story of Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, who used an analytical approach to assemble a competitive baseball squad even though his team, the Oakland Athletics, was seriously hampered by a lack of funds. The approach that Beane adopted revolutionised the way the baseball industry assesses and values players. Beane found players who were undervalued by their existing teams, bought them on the cheap, and in 2002 took Oakland on an amazing 20-game winning streak.

“What Oakland achieved is just amazing,” says Hill. “Going up against the [New York] Yankees and [Boston] Red Sox, with their enormous payrolls, and pushing them so close, would be analogous to a major football team like Real Madrid or Manchester United being threatened by a much smaller club, which can’t compete against the established teams with deeper pockets. Billy Beane did an awesome job.”

On screen, Beane is played by Brad Pitt, while Hill plays his right-hand man, Peter Brand. “It’s inspiring to see Brad at work,” says Hill. “He’s continually inspiring about the choices in the characters he plays. You could never guess what his next movie is going to be. He just makes a gutsy choice every time. You have got to respect anyone who does that. And yeah, we had fun on the set.”

Hill is keen to point out that despite the baseball backdrop, Moneyball is “not a movie about baseball. I view the movie as a story about underdogs, David and Goliath, a movie about people who are undervalued getting a chance to prove their worth to people who don’t think they have it. That is what I find wonderful and inspiring about it.”

Hill’s character in the film is no sportsman. Rather, he’s a greenhorn statistician brought onto the administration team in a lowly role. Beane then discovers him, places his confidence in this young man and, as with the players he recruits, gives him a chance to shine.

“We really designed Peter Brand to be kind of invisible,” explains Hill. “That’s the way Bennett Miller and I talked about the character. If he was sitting in a room, you couldn’t be able to pick him out of a thousand people. There were times in the movie when it was heartbreaking and Billy, Brad’s character, gives him a voice, shines a light on him and says, ‘This is what I want. I want your opinions and I believe in you,’ and this is the first time he has heard this.

“I never felt this way about a movie or a performance that I’ve been in before. He’s a really special character.”

Indeed, Hill says he feels as though his character’s position in Moneyball reflects his situation in real life. “I think every human being has had feelings of being undervalued at some point,” he says. “Honestly, for me, getting to be in this movie is something that actually echoes my story line in the film a little bit — where people see you so much as one thing and yet these guys came along and gave me a whole different chance to show that I can do other stuff as well.”

Last month, Hill’s performance in Moneyball was recognised by nominations for Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards for best supporting actor.

The 28-year-old Hill is best known for his work in the comedy arena with producer-director Judd Apatow, following The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, his breakout movie Superbad, and the likes of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Funny People and Get Him to the Greek.

“I’m proud of Moneyball because it is a really small performance,” says Hill. “I always get a lot of stick for Superbad and for yelling out curse words at people, so it’s important for me to play different kinds of characters. In Superbad, that was truly the character that they wanted me to play.

“I can’t complain about a thing in the world, though – I’m the luckiest guy ever – and I got to play in a film that a bunch of people saw and really liked. But when you do that, people have a difficult time in separating you from that character. So to get a film like Moneyball was a really beautiful, special gesture – that they believed that I could be the second lead in this big drama with Brad Pitt and Phil Hoffmann. And with Aaron Sorkin and Bennett Miller both believing in me, it’s a moment of real satisfaction.”

In 2010 Hill showcased his dramatic talents in the dark comedy Cyrus, alongside John C Reilly and Marisa Tomei. “That was a lot more dramatic than anything I’d ever done before,” notes the actor. “It’s a movie I’m really proud of, and to me it was a good transitional movie, just so it wouldn’t be too much of a shock if people were to see me in a drama.

“Whether it’s a comedy or drama, I just want the films I make to be meaningful,” he adds. “Something that is great. Cyrus and Moneyball are great. Cyrus was a gateway to this movie, and I hope to d o a lot more films like these.”

Born in Mill Valley, California, and educated at The New School, New York City, where he studied acting, Hill now has a film career that stretches back to 2004, when he snagged a small role in I Heart Huckabees. As well as proving himself a talented and versatile actor, he’s also an aspiring producer and writer who has worked up a number of screenplays. One recent project is a big-screen adaptation of the TV show 21 Jump Street, a popular series that began in the late 1980s and focused on a squad of youthful-looking undercover police officers investigating crimes in high schools. The original series gave Johnny Depp his first break.

“The movie version comes out in March 2012,” says Hill, who’ll star alongside Channing Tatum as one of the officers who goes back to school. He also co-wrote the screenplay. “By the day it comes out, I will have spent five years of my life on it. The goal was to make a John Hughes-type of movie meets Bad Boys, to make a really funny movie about the insecurities you had in high school. We wanted it to be a really cool, funny action movie as well.” Hill also stars in Neighborhood Watch, an upcoming comedy with Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn.