How I Met Your Mother star brings Jewish sensibility to his new comedy
Josh Radnor's new role is not a Jewish one but he still brings himself into it
What could be more Jewish than a “satisfying, feel–good portrait of family dysfunction”, which is how Josh Radnor’s new movie All Happy Families has been described.
Josh, who played the half-Jewish character Ted Mosby in the long-running sitcom How I Met Your Mother, takes on the role of Graham in this movie about the Landry family, which gathers for the weekend to fix up their family home in Chicago. Graham really wishes his life was in a better place, especially since he’s reconnected with his college crush, Dana (Chandra Russell). His mother, Sue (Becky Ann Baker), is looking forward to the next chapter in her life when an incident at her retirement party forces her to question things, including her marriage to complacent Roy (John Ashton). And brother Will (Rob Huebel), a television star, is in hot water over some troubling allegations at work.
“We Jews don’t own dysfunction,” says Josh, speaking to me from his home in Brooklyn, New York. “But the director is Greek, and she calls Greeks ‘the Jews of the sea’.” He adds that there’s a lot of love in the movie.
There is no obvious Jewishness in the film but Radnor brings that sensibility with him to his role as Graham. He comes from a strong Jewish background and grew up in the Midwest, in Columbus, Ohio, where he had a Jewish education.
Radnor and his family were very active in their Conservative synagogue, and he and his two sisters attended the Orthodox Hebrew day school, Columbus Torah Academy, from eighth grade through to high school. There, he spent half of the day studying Torah and Hebrew and the other half as any typical Midwesterner. He has visited Israel three times, including a six-week teen tour when he was 15 and a nine-week solo trip during his time at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
These days, Josh describes himself as “culturally Jewish and spiritually omnivorous. I’ll take wisdom wherever it’s on offer.” He and his Jewish wife Dr Jordana Jacobs (they got married last year in a snowstorm) they light the candles on Friday night, celebrate Passover and so on.
I wonder how Jewishness impacts his work. “My background has served me really well,’ he says. “Acting is 50 percent of myself and 50 percent of the character. It’s a combustion.”
In a way, then, all of his roles are autobiographical. In an interview with CBC in 2020 he said: “There’s something elementally about being Jewish that I just never have to fake. I don’t have to lean into it. There’s just something of my DNA about it.”
Josh feels on a deeper level that his Jewishness has inspired him. “Coming from a people that revere a book above all. We kiss it. It’s a sprawling, strange narrative. We love story. We love making sense of our lives through story. I consider myself a storyteller. I’m always telling stories.”
Josh played alongside Al Pacino in the Nazi-hunting television series Hunters. He also had a role in the very Jewish Fleishman is in Trouble, which starred Jesse Eisenberg, who recently earned an Oscar nomination for his Holocaust film A Real Pain. “Jesse was lovely to work with. I admire him a lot as an artist and like him a ton as a person.”
The parts in Hunters and Fleischman are explicitly Jewish, written for Jewish actors, and I ask Josh where he stands on JewFace, the debate about non-Jews playing Jewish roles. “I appreciate when Jews are played with grace and subtlety,” he says. “We can get sensitive.” In an Instagram exchange with David Baddiel about Hunters, he convinced the author to add a footnote to his book Jews Don’t Count because Baddiel hadn’t watched the entire series.
I ask whether he has been affected by October 7? “It’s impossible not to be,” he answers straight away. “You’d have to have your head buried in the sand not to be alarmed by rising antisemitism. It might be epigenetic. I want the Jewish experience to be about something much larger than antisemitism. I thought Rabbi Jonathan Sacks did some incredible writing about antisemitism. It’s alarming how it mutates and metastasises, and this is the latest strain of the virus.”
Josh is a busy man. His directorial debut, which he also wrote, Happythankyoumoreplease, won the Sundance Film Festival Audience Award. He directed and starred in the movie Liberal Arts. He makes his own original music and is half of the duo Radnor & Lee. Last year, he starred in an off-Broadway play called The Ally about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The play revolves around a Jewish college professor, played by Josh, who initially agrees to sign a manifesto from students in response to an incident of police brutality but disagrees when he sees there is a section accusing Israel of engaging in an “apartheid” and “genocide”. He describes the play as “a brilliant piece”.
Later this year Josh is launching a new podcast called The People of the Book, in which he will interview Jewish authors and celebrities about their books and lives, discussing everything from food to spirituality.
With Josh at its heart and its themes of family, tradition and personal growth, All Happy Families certainly feels like a Jewish family movie.
All Happy Families is in cinemas now
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