Crying with Julian
grumpy, provocative and silly
Is it a cop-out to kick off these interviews with my own boyfriend? Maybe! Even if it happens to be that he’s a remarkably funny and generally wonderful individual who has developed a hugely popular web-series which consistently brings joy, laughter and universal nostalgia to millions? Maybe, still! Regardless, let’s do it. I sat down with Julian Shapiro-Barnum, writer / actor / converser-with-children / boyfriend-to-me to talk tears.
Julian doesn’t really cry. It used to be something that bothered him, he tells me in the backyard of a co-working space he uses, but now it’s neither here nor there. We went to acting school together, and he felt the dry expression of his emotions rendered him a failure there. He’s twenty-three now, entering his second year post-grad, and grades himself less for his emotions these days. “If I had to describe my emotions,” he says, “I’d say that I have three moods: grumpy, provocative and silly”
“Well-” I’m interjecting here,
“Yeah,” he agrees already, “provocative is like, a constant state, and grumpy and silly are the shades”. Editorializing, but I can also vouch for him being sweet and patient. Big-hearted. Welcoming. But he’d certainly never be described as “tortured”– he’d tried “tortured” on, the costume of a brooding, Smiths-listening artist, particularly during his time abroad, but there still was something self-effacing to it, the actor in the costume winking at the audience, relishing in the portrayal. He was playing Angsty in this case, though; not weepy.
Still, Julian has had his fair share of memorable cries: this song, this book, any finale of any show he’s watched (“no matter how stupid”). Virtually any Calvin and Hobbes. But most notably, Julian cries at movie trailers.
Trailers for movies he’s been looking forward to, movies he has no relationship to, movies he doesn’t even plan to see: a well-made trailer plays him like a violin. In the movie theater Sunday night, seeing “The Banshees of Inisherin” (at which I was sobbing almost immediately, and he was dry-eyed “but deeply affected!!!”), a trailer for the new Black Panther movie, “Wakanda Forever” played. An isolated vocal line singing “No Woman, No Cry” floats above a shot of Lupita Nyong’o standing on the beach, her back to the camera. “This is gonna be a bad movie,” Julian groaned to me, lamenting Marvel’s shameless money-grabbing tactics, the industrial complex they’ve made of movies, the way they treat us like suckers. But as soon as the shots were transitioning in sync with the drum-hits, the trailer had him in the palm of its hand. We are suckers, after all. As the trailer climbed into an emotional, masterful mashup of songs and shots, he was misty-eyed. When it ended, he whispered, “it’s… gonna be a good movie”.
Another time, kind of out of nowhere, he pulled up this compilation of every trailer for every Planet of the Apes movie. He wept the whole seventeen minutes (“I really care about those apes,” he said, later, when I asked, “I don’t like to see them getting hurt”).
Also, “Marry Me”. This one is on its own tier. He did not see this movie. I asked him to explain the plot to me from memory:
“Jennifer Lopez is a pop star… and she has a bad breakup… and her team thinks it's a good idea for her to marry somebody? And Owen Wilson is just this, like, total joe-shmoe, he’s at the concert but he doesn’t even want to be there, he’s holding a sign that says ‘Marry Me’ but it’s somebody else’s sign, and she sees it and she’s like, ‘yes’. Am I butchering this plot?”
I don’t know! I’ve never seen it either!
“The part that made me cry is when it gets serious for him, but he feels like it’s a publicity stunt for her”. :(!!!!
When asked why he didn’t see the movie after reacting so strongly to the trailer, he replied that the trailer gave him as much of the movie as he needed. Emotional response: provoked. Mission: accomplished! The movie received a 61% on Rotten Tomatoes, but, according to the reviews, it did what it needed to do.
I asked him about his emotions fitting into his professional life. He works an incredibly outward-facing job which puts his emotions on display, along with the rest of him: he talks to children on-camera for Recess Therapy, an internet show we work on together, along with Julia Ty Goldberg. In a creative career, the reputation might be that emotions serve as initiative for the work actually happening. As a member of the team, I can vouch firsthand for what Julian describes the relevance of his emotions to be. “If I’m thinking about my emotions while we’re filming, they’re in the way,” he explains, “Recess Therapy is very positive, and for that to work, I have to be very positive, too. I try to create a bubble when I’m talking to the kids. Or, like, I’ll smile for the parents, at least. But it’s no use hiding how you’re feeling from a kid– they can tell. I like to be level with them, but also to bring my best energy”. For the record, between the two of us, we found we could count on one hand the number of times a child has cried on a shoot, but we have broached the subject quite a bit. Our first ever shoot of Recess Therapy was on the topic of “happiness”. One kid, age five, memorably explained to us the flawed expectation that kids must always be happy: “I want to be happy every day,” he confessed, “but you can’t be happy every day. I want to cry every day”. While heartbreaking, this still makes us laugh.
“Oh that’s interesting,'' I said as we were recollecting, “when else is crying funny?”
“Your crying is funny,” he replies. It’s true– I can’t think of a cry I had recently that didn’t end in us laughing. And, if I haven’t been clear about this, I cry a lot. So that’s saying something.
“And,” he continues, “well— it wasn’t funny then, but— that time with the person on the street…” Yes. In the past year or so, Julian’s become more and more recognizable for his work on the show. It’s become rare that he doesn’t get stopped on the street by a fan of the show. Often it’s brief, sweet-to-neutral. Sometimes it is a little annoying (once, mid-kissing goodbye at the train station on my way back to Boston, someone literally tapped him on the shoulder and looked us in our (my) teary face to commend him on his work). But at its absolute worst, it is what he’s referencing here.
Julian was walking through Brooklyn, crying from stress, on the phone with his mom, when somebody stopped him: “he recognized me and asked if I was who he thought I was, and I was like yeah, but I was clearly not okay, and he goes ‘quick selfie, quick selfie,’ and just takes a picture of us both and posts it and tags me”. The photo was gone after twenty-four hours but lives forever in our memory: this random man, beaming at his celebrity sighting, and sweet, obliging Julian, managing a weak smile, wet-faced behind him. The photo was one of the only of Julian crying to exist. Like the Library of Alexandria, historians will mourn its loss for generations.
Julian asked that I end this with a list of his “do’s and don’ts for crying,” so, to close us out…:
do cry:
-if you’re grieving
-if your car breaks down
-if you catch a pitch at a baseball game
-if your brother comes from war
don’t cry:
-in front of your wife
-if your team loses
-when they’re out of pastrami
-if you can’t sound out a word
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